National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Marine Energy in the United States: An Overview of Opportunities
Kilcher, L., Fogarty, M. and Lawson, M., National Renewable Energy Laboratory Energy Solutions
While marine energy technologies are still at the relatively early stages of development, the resource potential is immense and distributed widely across the nation’s coastlines and rivers. We use the following definitions to frame the conversation about marine energy resource potentials (International Electrotechnical Commission 2020):
• Theoretical resource—the energy available in the resource
• Technical resource—the proportion of the theoretical resource that can be captured using existing technology options
• Practical resource—the proportion of the technical resource that is available after consideration of external constraints. Where ‘external constraints’ are the socioeconomic, environmental, regulatory, and other competing-use constraints that determine whether a project is viable at a specific site.
In this work, we focus on the technical resource within the nation’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ)2 that can be harnessed for large-scale (megawatt- to gigawatt-scale) energy generation.
Read the full report here
← Older Post Newer Post →