Wave Energy Potential
Waves form a potentially large world-wide energy resource, estimated at more than 2 TeraWatts. There are several regions around the world with high incident wave power levels, which are particularly well suited to exploiting this renewable energy source. The Irish coast ranks high among regions suited to capturing the power of the sea for energy generation. To date, the attempts to design and deploy cost-efficient devices have met with limited success (the main success being using wave energy to power several hundred navigation buoys). However, the last five years have seen a resurgence of interest in wave energy throughout the world, with several companies currently developing and deploying new devices that represent a significant improvement over older concepts.
There are well advanced plans to increase the wave energy capacity in the rest of the world to over 15 MegaWatts in the next few years. Further predictions for future world-wide capacity are, at present, speculative but several companies have plans for the deployment of several MegaWatts per year in the period 2002-2005, with increasing deployment thereafter. An independent assessment of the likely markets has been made, taking into account competing sources of electricity. This indicated that, if the wave energy devices performed as predicted, then their economic contribution would be over 2000 TeraWatts per year by the year 2025. This is comparable to the amount of electricity currently produced world-wide by large scale hydroelectric schemes and would correspond to a capital investment of over £500 billion.
Clearly, it is now up to the wave energy industry to co-ordinate itself more effectively and to address those issues that undermine investor support.
European Policies for Wave Energy