Ocean power

One fifth's of UK's energy needs can be fulfiled by harnessing ocean energy. There are two broad approaches: wave based and tidal based. Wave-based devices generate electricity from movements of the sea surface, whereas tidal stream installations sit on the sea floor and use the regular ebb and flow of tides. The bigger problem however is to transport the energy into the grid, which currently requires power cables to be laid out on ocean floors all the way from the ocean power plants to the grid. Can fuel cells be useful here, with fuel-cell tankers (aka oil tankers) plying back and forth to store and forward the energy...

The South West England Regional Development Agency has initiated a project called Wavehub, that will set up a testbed for experimenting with different wave energy generation devices.