ABSTRACT
In tropical regions, renewable energy may be generated with salinity and temperature gradients. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) uses the temperature difference between the warm surface waters and the cool deep water of the ocean to turn a liquid such as alcohol or ammonia into vapor to run an engine and produce electricity. This chapter discusses the fundamentals of tidal stream technologies, followed by numerical modeling at regional and local scales. It focuses on the impact of boundary conditions, specifically the bathymetric data used and the mesh size, on tidal energy resource assessments. The chapter principally provides in-depth coverage of renewable energy by way of tidal current energy. It summarizes the resource assessment protocols developed by Black and Veatch for the European Marine Energy Centre. The physical parameterizations in dynamical models can be improved through a better understanding of the physics at model scales, through laboratory experimentation or computational fluid dynamics simulations that resolve the full equations.
