When a clean energy company goes under, the hardware usually goes with it. Someone buys the assets, a crane shows up, the site gets cleared, and the whole thing becomes a line in a bankruptcy filing.<\/p>\n
Montreal got a different ending. A 132-ton hydrokinetic turbine has been sitting on the bottom of the St. Lawrence River off the Old Port, near the Concorde Bridge, since 2010. It stopped producing years ago. Quebec ordered it pulled out almost a decade ago. It is still down there.<\/p>\n
And the company that now wants to put nine new turbines on that exact patch of riverbed has a signed power contract with Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec, no environmental approvals, and a chief executive who ran the outfit that left the first machine behind.<\/p>\n
Le Devoir broke the story<\/a> on July 21. Two days of Quebec coverage followed, all of it in French. Almost nobody outside the province has picked it up, which is a shame, because the pitch Montreal is being asked to buy involves the words “AI data centers” and a manufacturing plan aimed squarely at the United States.<\/p>\n The first machine went in during the summer of 2010, built by a Quebec outfit then called RSW RER. Ottawa put C$3 million of repayable funding into it, according to the federal announcement at the time, on a project the government valued at C$12 million with 25 short-term jobs attached.<\/p>\n Marine contractor McKeil Marine handled the install and describes the unit in its own case study as roughly 16 by 15 by 23 feet, weighing over 120 metric tons, lowered onto the riverbed in a seven-knot current using a flat-deck barge, a jack-up barge and two work tugs. Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec’s fact sheet on hydrokinetic power<\/a> puts the machine’s planned capacity at 100 kilowatts.<\/p>\n It worked, at least mechanically. The company still cites the prototype as having run 34,522 hours without a failure.<\/p>\n Then came the big swing. In November 2013, Boeing announced a multiyear agreement<\/a> with RER Hydro and the Quebec government for 40 turbines totaling about 9 megawatts, which Boeing said would give the St. Lawrence the world’s largest river hydrokinetic farm. Quebec committed up to C$85 million toward a C$130 million plan built around a turbine factory at B\u00e9cancour.<\/p>\n The factory never opened. RER Hydro ran out of money in 2014 and went into bankruptcy that July. La Presse later reported C$49 million in claims written off across 170 companies and suppliers, and put the total sunk into the river at close to C$50 million. Of the 40 turbines, exactly one ever got wet.<\/p>\n In November 2016, three Quebec ministries wrote to the owners demanding the machine come out by that December, describing it as turning uncontrollably and a hazard to aquatic wildlife. La Presse reported the letter went unanswered. Ten years on, La Presse noted this month that the new project would include removing it.<\/p>\n ARECOR \u00c9nergie was founded in 2023 and holds the assets that came out of that collapse. Its plan is nine turbines on the riverbed near the Concorde Bridge, in front of the Old Port, at 0.5 megawatts each. That is 4.5 megawatts if all nine ever go in, and roughly one apartment tower’s worth of demand per unit.<\/p>\n President and CEO Imad Hamad told Le Devoir that the first two turbines “will be connected to Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec’s grid by the end of 2027.” Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec has signed a power purchase agreement. The hardware is moving too: a 13-foot-diameter turbine ordered by ARECOR came out of a foundry in Denain, France, last spring.<\/p>\n What does not exist yet is permission.<\/p>\n Both levels of government confirmed to Le Devoir that ARECOR has not obtained the environmental authorizations it needs. A review request went to Fisheries and Oceans Canada in March 2025 and is still being analyzed under the Fisheries Act and the Species at Risk Act. The department declined to say which listed species are involved.<\/p>\n Quebec has decided the nine-turbine project is not subject to the province’s impact assessment procedure, so it will not go before the province’s public hearings body. It still needs a certificate of authorization from the environment ministry.<\/p>\n Montreal’s mayor, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, was asked about it the morning the story landed and said she was “not certain the city is there yet,” adding that those conversations would have to happen with Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec, according to La Presse<\/a>. She also said the file raises an enormous number of questions, starting with where, how, and what it actually means for the city.<\/p>\n Hamad was RER Hydro’s chief executive when it collapsed. When the assets and intellectual property were sold in 2015 to T\u00e9l\u00e9syst\u00e8me \u00c9nergie, he was involved in that company too, and he told Le Devoir he relaunched operations alongside businessman Charles Sirois, who later sold his stake. ARECOR now holds those assets.<\/p>\n He describes the company as carrying no debt, and says the new project needs no public money. That last part matters, given how the previous version ended.<\/p>\n It is a genuinely unusual position. The man asking to install nine turbines has more hours of real hydrokinetic operating experience in that specific stretch of river than anybody else alive, and he also has the only bankruptcy attached to it.<\/p>\n His ambitions are not small either. Beyond Montreal, he told Le Devoir the company intends to build hundreds of turbines for Western Canada and the United States to feed artificial intelligence data centers. ARECOR’s own projects page lists its Canadian work as confidential and puts the full pipeline at 1.33 gigawatts. As of now, the company has no hydrokinetic turbine in commercial operation anywhere.<\/p>\n ARECOR’s website credits its GEN-III machine with a “record setting power coefficient of 1.22” thanks to a patented cowl design, plus 40 years of maintenance-free operation from a passive magnetic bearing, and says the technology has been verified and certified by DNV-GL<\/a>.<\/p>\n The 1.22 is the number worth slowing down on. The Betz limit, which is textbook fluid dynamics, caps an open rotor at 0.593 of the kinetic energy passing through the area its blades sweep. Nothing gets past that.<\/p>\n A cowl is a duct, and ducted turbines are conventionally rated against the area of the throat rather than the wider column of water the shroud pulls in. Normalize it that way and coefficients above 1.0 turn up routinely in the literature. It is not a physics violation. It is also not a number you can put next to an open-rotor figure and call it a comparison.<\/p>\n The 40 years is a design intent from the bearing choice, not a service record, since no machine has run anywhere near that long. Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec’s fact sheet is blunt about where the whole field sits: hydrokinetic technology is roughly where wind power was fifteen years ago, and permits alone can take several years.<\/p>\n Machines that sit on the bottom under their own ballast rather than being piled into it are not exotic, incidentally. Scotland’s tidal array has been running that way for years<\/a> in the Pentland Firth.<\/p>\n ARECOR is not the only company eyeing that water. Ocean Renewable Power Company, headquartered in Portland, Maine, is putting two RivGen units into the St. Lawrence at Montreal, rated at 80 kilowatts apiece.<\/p>\n Natural Resources Canada announced C$4 million<\/a> for the project on February 4, through its Energy Innovation Program, with the work running to 2029. NRCan’s project listing puts the full budget at C$9.46 million.<\/p>\n The RivGen is a cross-flow design that looks like two push-mower reels mounted end to end between steel pontoons, and it is the same family of machine that has been sitting on an Alaskan riverbed since 2019<\/a>, under one of the largest salmon runs on the planet.<\/p>\n ORPC Canada president Alexandre Paris, who previously ran innovation commercialization at Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec, described the install to La Tribune in plain terms: “We just set our system down on the bottom.” No dam, no piles.<\/p>\n Two scope corrections are worth making, because the coverage has been loose about both. This is not the first RivGen in Canada; ORPC put one in Manitoba’s Winnipeg River back in 2022. What the company actually claims is the first urban-scale deployment of its technology, which is a different and more defensible statement.<\/p>\n And the timing has slipped. La Tribune reported in February that the units were going in over the summer. Canada’s National Observer reported in March<\/a> that they were due this autumn. Neither has been publicly confirmed in the water yet.<\/p>\n Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec’s fact sheet carries a figure that explains why this technology keeps stalling. For a plant running at least ten turbines in a string, it puts the break-even cost of river-current power at US$0.80 per kilowatt-hour, against US$0.41 for tidal currents and US$0.25 for ocean currents.<\/p>\n River current is the most expensive of the three, by a wide margin, in a utility’s own published assessment. The sheet also notes that few river sites have flow speeds high enough and steady enough across a full year to make the economics work, and that cross-flow turbines are generally less efficient than axial ones, though they will produce regardless of which way the water is going.<\/p>\n The resource is real. Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec puts Canada’s river-current potential at 15,000 megawatts and Quebec’s at about 1,000. Getting at it has been the problem for sixteen years.<\/p>\nThe turbine Quebec asked for back in 2016<\/h2>\n
Nine turbines, one contract, zero permits<\/h2>\n
The same man is in both stories<\/h2>\n
A power coefficient of 1.22 needs an asterisk<\/h2>\n
The American machine going into the same river<\/h2>\n
80 cents a kilowatt-hour is the number nobody puts on a slide<\/h2>\n