Renewable Energy Resources mainly depend on climate & weather conditions. And both terms depend mainly on the geographical situation. For Ocean Energy devices, this means, that their power output will be a function of physical variables such as the wave depth, wave direction, wave height and wave period. Storms, swells and other physical conditions have an important influence on them. However, first mentioned variables can be forecast actually with almost three days in advance.

Tidal prediction works even with greater accuracy on the long-term. This is due to the known elliptical moon motion around the earth, resulting in estimable periods for ebb and flood. All this data analysis is performed over strategically positioned buoys, satellites and over meteorological forecasting models such as LOLA. Links to this and to other related web can be found under the main menu.

Extracting the information from these sources, the wave potential can be estimated for all the different coastal locations. It is defined in kW / m coast, as the following graph shows

Different studies point out an operating range of 20 kW/m or more for a profitable deployment of wave energy devices. This argument limits for sure the location choice in comparison to wind or solar. But still, the fact is that wave energy is stored wind energy. Therefore it is far more concentrated & steady in terms of power output. Also, offshore wind energy constellations may well be combined with wave energy farms in a lot of chosen locations. South America, Northern Europe, South Africa & South Australia e.g. may be optimal locations for wave energy extraction, as it can be seen on the graph above. However, tidal energy has to be regarded separately. On the one hand, there are tidal barrages, such as La Rance. The theory defines locations with tide gauges between ebb and flood > 5 m optimal for energy purposes. As the following graph shows, the locations choice is reduced to some geographical conditions, such as river bottlenecks, or estuaries.

The Bay of Fundy in Canada, the Severn Estuary in Northwest England and South Korea are some of the current focus. Note that Osmotic plants may be well be integrated in this plants. On the other hand, there are also tidal currents. Being also dependent on the tidal gauge, it is the flow velocity through P~v3 that has a greater influence on the hydraulic power. In these case, there are plenty of river locations, estuary mouths, or even sea locations that could be used for it.


The geographic conditions for Thermal Energy extraction are far more exigent than for the subjects mentioned before. This is due to the enormous distances between ocean surface and seabed needed in order to get considerable temperature gradients.

Feasibility , environmental and even design studies may be derived from the given maps. It is noted, that Google is currently developing a Google Ocean environment, where the sea's geography can be revealed in photographic mode.