Insights into Wave Energy

The marine environment can supply energy in three main forms – tidal stream, wave and tidal range/barrage. These have significant potential, since the UK has some of the world’s best available tidal and wave resources in its waters. This paper examines the potential for exploiting wave energy in the UK and concludes that:

• Even with aggressive cost reduction and innovation activities, current attenuator wave energy technologies are highly unlikely to meet the ETI/UKERC marine energy roadmap targets, and are therefore unlikely to make a significant contribution to the UK energy system in the coming decades
• Radical new wave energy extraction and conversion system approaches are needed to reduce cost and increase energy extraction and reliability. This will provide a trajectory towards lower cost solutions in the long term.