Examining the Potential of Marine Renewable Energy : A Net Energy Perspective
Samsó, Roger (Centre de Recerca Ecològica i d'Aplicacions Forestals)
Crespin, Júlia (Universitat de Barcelona. Departament de Dinàmica de la Terra i de l'Oceà)
García-Olivares, Antonio (Institut de Ciències del Mar)
Solé, Jordi (Universitat de Barcelona. Departament de Dinàmica de la Terra i de l'Oceà)

Data:	2023
Resum:	It is often claimed that marine renewable energy alone could meet the electricity demand of current and future human societies. However, such claims are based on highly uncertain estimations of the global potentials of marine renewable energy sources (including tidal, ocean currents, wave, offshore wind and salinity and thermal gradients), and do not take into account the embedded energy of current technologies. To better understand the effective potential of marine energy, we conducted a literature review of its gross, technical, economic and sustainable potentials, as well as the energy return on investment (EROI), and estimated the net energy potential. We found that all marine technologies could provide a maximum energy surplus of 57,000 (Formula presented. ) / (Formula presented. ). This figure goes down to (Formula presented. ) when excluding offshore wind. The previous figures do not include the contribution from ocean currents, for which no reliable estimates of global potentials and EROIs could be obtained. Due to its high upfront costs and environmental impacts and low social acceptance, no additional tidal range capacity expansion is envisioned. Similarly, the combination of a low sustainable potential and the low EROI makes the large-scale exploitation of salinity gradients unlikely with current technologies. Including all technologies, the average EROI of marine energy is (Formula presented. ), but excluding offshore wind reduces the average EROI to (Formula presented. ). While we did consider sustainability constraints for some marine energy sources, our estimation of marine net energy potential primarily relied on technical factors and did not account for economic and legal constraints. Therefore, the results presented here should be interpreted as an upper bound for the actual net energy contribution of marine energy sources to the global energy mix.
Ajuts:	European Commission 691287 European Commission 821105
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Matèria:	EROI ; Oceanic energy ; Offshore wind ; Ocean currents ; OTEC ; Tidal ; SGE ; Wave
Publicat a:	Sustainability, Vol. 15, Issue 10 (May 2023) , art. 8050, ISSN 2071-1050

DOI: 10.3390/su15108050

35 p, 524.4 KB

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