The Montreal Gazette reports three test tidal power projects are due to go live in the Bay of Fundy next year - Bay of Fundy tidal power to be tested.

Ocean energy is the next big thing, says Jean-François Ally, a senior project manager with Alstom Hydro of France. And generating electricity from the famous Bay of Fundy tides will only be the start, he said.

Alstom, besides being the world's second-biggest trainmaker after Bombardier Inc., holds third place in power generating equipment. It has a turbine plant at Sorel-Tracy, near Montreal.

Ally, speaking at an energy conference in Halifax, said his company has partnered with Vancouver's Clean Current Power Systems to deploy one of three test tidal turbine-generators in the Bay of Fundy in 2012. Lockheed Martin and Irving Shipbuilding are also partners in the test program.

The Maritimes have dreamt of harnessing the Bay of Fundy and its 55-foot tides for 50 years or more. Nova Scotia installed a Swiss-designed tidal pilot plant at the head of Fundy about 30 years ago but a full-scale development never overcame technical and financial obstacles.

Reuters has an article on Alstom's recent forecast regarding wave power development over the next decade (which indicates the somewhat slow rate of progress for this particular form of clean energy) - Alstom estimates 100 MW wave power by 2020.

French engineering group Alstom may install roughly 100 megawatts of wave power by 2020, its Ocean Energy Director Philippe Gilson estimated.

Alstom announced this week that it had bought a 40 percent stake in Scottish wave power developer AWS Ocean Energy, in one of the first cases of a large company entering the fledgling sector.

Wave power is behind tidal power in a marine energy sector which in turn lags maturing renewable power technologies such as wind and solar.

On a 40-year time scale, however, the world could develop as much as 300 gigawatts of power from the movement of waves, equivalent to about double Germany's entire power generating capacity, Alstom said.

The French company's hydro division, where the company's ocean energy is based, is aiming for a 20 percent global market share, which implied tens of gigawatts of installed base for wave power in the long-run, said Gilson.

"For 2020 we hope we can get close to 100 megawatts installed base," he added, referring to that as a "guesstimate".

"Wind was in the same situation 30 years ago. During 10 or 15 years not much happened and then suddenly exponential growth happened for a number of factors. These things take time."