In partnership with energy3: Canada’s Energy Conference, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will host a workshop on October 16th, day one of the conference: “Coupling ocean energy with other sectors: Innovative business models and complementarities with renewable offshore technologies.”
After decades of efforts from some governments, industry, entrepreneurs and research centres, ocean energy technologies (OET) -including wave, tidal, OTEC and salinity gradient- are yet to reach the commercialisation stage and scale-up deployment. When looking into the economics around OET, based on the levelized cost of electricity indicator, it seems to be that the gap between OET and other renewable power generation technologies continues to be rather big. However, currently some efforts are observed in the direction of finding additional revenue streams associated with the deployment of OET, in addition to selling electricity, which may help to strengthen their business case.