Your questions answered: marine energy generation

Britain is a world leader in marine energy research. But despite strong progress in recent years, widespread commercial-scale wave and tidal generation still seems a long way off. To answer your questions on what marine energy developers have achieved so far and what challenges remain, we’ve lined up three experts:

Since waves are produced by the wind, why is it worth developing complex technology that can withstand the harsh ocean environment in order to capture wave power, rather than using the more direct approach of wind turbines?

Max Carcas: Wave energy is produced by the time-averaged transfer of energy from the wind to the sea and brings a number of advantages:
• The resource is more predictable. Waves are produced by weather systems that may have occurred a number of days previously and can travel thousands of kilometres without losing energy.
• The resource is more consistent. Because of smoothing and averaging, the resource doesn’t vary rapidly in the same way that wind energy does.
• Wave energy is much more concentrated than wind energy, meaning that wave power projects can require significantly less area to produce the same output as a wind farm, perhaps four to five times less area per megawatt installed.