Canada’s Ocean Supercluster has announced a trio of new projects worth $14.2 million: one developing electric propulsion technology, one to help optimize maritime supply chains and one to study kelp’s role in carbon sequestration and marine biodiversity.

The first project, dubbed the Canadian Electric Propulsion Acceleration Coalition, or CEPAC, is the largest of the three with a planned cost of $7 million. Of that, $2.7 million is coming from the Supercluster and the rest from a private sector group led by Photon Marine Canada, a Victoria, B.C.-based maker of electric motors for speedboats.

Other project partners include Halifax’s BlueGrid, the product name for the company Rimot, which is developing technology to let boats act as energy storage on a grid. Other Nova Scotian partners are Rosborough Boats, also in Halifax, and ABCO Industries, the Lunenburg shipyard. Joining from British Columbia are Malahat Solutions, VoltSafe and Mostar Labs.

“Vessel and energy data plays a major role throughout the design, operations, and commercialization elements of the project,” said BlueGrid CEO Andrew Boswell in a statement. “Insights from customers’ existing conventionally powered vessels will be captured and used to inform everything from infrastructure deployment to hull designs, and then the new electric vessel data will be used to optimize performance to charging.”

The Verifying Ocean Climate Impacts Project, meanwhile, is led by Vancouver-based veritree, which sells a platform for tree-planting organizations to document their work and analyze their environmental impacts. Collaborating with veritree will be Canadian Kelp, a seaweed farm and packaged goods-maker on Vancouver Island. The Supercluster is contributing $2.1 million of the $5 million projected project cost.

The two companies will aim to build a technology platform for kelp farms to better track their climate impacts, such as with the help of specialized cameras.

And the $2.2 million Optimizing Maritime Supply Chains project will be led by OceanSync, another Halifax company that is commercializing a potential solution to a longstanding challenge for the marine industry: that of obtaining reliable weather data.

The OceanSync sensor suite gathers meteorological data like wind speed and barometric pressure, which an edge computing device then pre-processes before uploading it to the cloud every 10 minutes via satellite internet, usually provided by aerospace unicorn Starlink.

The other project partners will be Everstream, which sells a supply chain analytics software suite called BlueNode, and Bespoke Global Logistics & Strategies. The companies will collaborate to develop a “Modal Optimization Tool” — software that will advise companies about how to optimize their supply chains for sustainability and climate resilience. The Supercluster is contributing $875,000.

“Supply chains are a crucial part of any business and essential for the health of our global economy, yet they face ever-increasing risk from natural disasters, geopolitical factors, and other disruptions,” said BlueNode Vice President of Public Sector and Trade Jon Bovit.

“Together with Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, we’re taking supply chain and trade intelligence further to enable global organizations to understand how to get their raw materials and products to customers safely and quickly while optimizing for speed, security, and sustainability.”