Ocean – A vast reserve of renewable energy

Abstract

Ocean has an immense potential to be exploited as an energy resource. The advancement in the renewable energy technologies have opened several avenues for exploring the ocean to combat the rising concern of the global climate change and the worldwide energy supply. The renewable energy is the inevitable choice for a sustainable economic growth in times of economic crisis, and the ocean environment is an inadequately utilized domain for the application of renewable technologies. This paper strongly focuses on the importance of the various forms of energy from the ocean environment like wave energy, wind energy, tidal energy, ocean thermal energy. A strong assessment of the current renewable technologies that can be strategically deployed to the ocean environment with minimal influence on the marine ecosystem, has been presented here. The current work targets the ocean environment for its availability as a promising resource to assist in the effort of tackling the world energy issues. The history of continued research on the requirement and consequence of enhancing the already existing renewable technologies, in the ocean has been traced in this paper. This study provides an overview of the key parameters responsible for the accurate choice of ocean energy harnessing site, that will eventually serve as an excellent reference for the rational deployment guidelines of the future renewable technologies. Ocean energy through waves, tides and thermal gradients is a powerful source of abundant clean, renewable energy and the essential information needed for the conversion of the ocean energy to usable form is presented in this paper.