International Journal of Environmental Engineering and Management

ISSN 2231-1319, Volume 4, Number 4 (2013), pp. 397-404

© Research India Publications
http://www.ripublication.com/ ijeem.htm

Energy from the Ocean and Scope of its Utilization in India

R.C. Sharma1 and Niharika Sharma2

1
Department of Applied Sciences and Humanities, Dronacharya College of
Engineering, Khentawas, Gurgaon – 123506, Haryana, India.
2
PGT, Meenakshi World School Gurgaon – 122001, Haryana, India.

Abstract

Energy is a basic input to the national economy, both agricultural and

industrial, apart from being an instrument for improving the quality of
life. Provision of adequate quantities and kind of energy is and will
continue to be a challenge to the Governments and the Institutions in
the country engaged in various specific tasks relating to energy supply
and transport. The primary commercial energy inputs to the Indian
economy are from coal, oils, and hydroelectricity and to a limited
extent nuclear energy.
Concerns about carbon dioxide and global warming and the security
and long term availability of fossil fuel supplies has led to greatly
renewed interest in all forms of renewable energy and so the time may
have come for ocean renewable energy as well. All ocean energy
technologies, except tidal barrages, are conceptual, undergoing R&D,
or are in the pre-commercial prototype and demonstration stage. The
globally distributed resources and relatively high energy density
associated with most ocean energy sources provide ocean energy with
the potential to make an important contribution to energy supply in the
coming decades, if technical challenges can be overcome and costs
thereby reduced. Accordingly, a range of initiatives are being
employed to promote and accelerate the development and deployment
of ocean energy technologies. In India’s perspective, there is
tremendous scope for the energy from the ocean as India has a long
coastline of about 7500 km and about 336 islands in Bay of Bengal and
Arabian Sea. This paper presents a basic review of the technology of
each of the major sources including wave conversion, fixed and
floating wind turbines, free flowing current turbines and ocean thermal
398 R.C. Sharma & Niharika Sharma

energy, and discusses the magnitudes of each of the resources in India,

and the particular technical issues each technology is facing.

Keywords: Ocean, energy, turbines, waves, thermal, tidal.

1. Introduction
The ocean can produce two types of energy: thermal energy from the sun's heat, and
mechanical energy from the tides and waves. Oceans cover more than 70% of Earth's
surface, making them the world's largest solar collectors. The sun's heat warms the
surface water a lot more than the deep ocean water, and this temperature difference
creates thermal energy. Just a small portion of the heat trapped in the ocean could
power the world. Ocean mechanical energy is quite different from ocean thermal
energy. Even though the sun affects all ocean activity, tides are driven primarily by the
gravitational pull of the moon, and waves are driven primarily by the winds. As a
result, tides and waves are intermittent sources of energy, while ocean thermal energy
is fairly constant. The ocean also provides, naturally, various mechanisms to collect,
concentrate and transform that energy into forms that might be more useful. The
oceans are a heat engine that transforms solar energy into the kinetic energy of wind,
waves and current. The average solar power flux onto the surface of the ocean at 15o
North latitude is about 0.2kW/m2, but this is typically converted to trade winds of
about 20 knots, which have a power flux of 0.6 kW/m2. Here though, the energy is
over a vertical area, perpendicular to the wind. This wind energy subsequently is
concentrated into a wave energy flux of 8 kW/m2 [1].These forms of high quality
energy are very useful, but often intermittent, require more or less large collectors, and
may have environmental issues. On the other hand, wind and wave tend to be stronger
in winter, when direct solar energy is lower, so they may provide seasonal leveling in
association with land based direct solar systems. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion
eliminates the heat collector, and provides steady power, but has practical issues and
tends to be in distant locations.

2. Wave Energy
Many wave energy technologies representing a range of operating principles have been
conceived, and in many cases demonstrated, to convert energy from waves into a
usable form of energy. Major variables include the method of wave interaction with
respective motions (heaving, surging, pitching) as well as water depth (deep,
intermediate, shallow) and distance from shore (shoreline, near shore, offshore).
Efficient operation of floating devices requires large motions, which can be achieved
by resonance or by latching, that is, with hold/release of moving parts until potential
energy has accumulated. A generic scheme for characterizing ocean wave energy
generation devices consists of primary, secondary and tertiary conversion stages [2].
The primary interface subsystem represents fluid-mechanical processes and feeds
Energy from the Ocean and Scope of its Utilization in India 399

mechanical power to the next stage. The secondary subsystem can incorporate direct
drive or include short-term storage, so that power processing can be facilitated before
the electrical machine is operated. The tertiary conversion utilizes electromechanical
and electrical processes.
Recent reviews have identified more than 50 wave energy devices at various stages
of development [3,4&5]. The dimensional scale constraints of wave devices have not
been fully investigated in practice. The dimension of wave devices in the direction of
wave propagation is generally limited to lengths below the scale of the dominant
wavelengths that characterize the wave power density spectrum at a particular site.
Utility-scale electricity generation from wave energy will require device arrays, rather
than larger devices and, as with wind turbine generators, devices are likely to be
chosen for specific site conditions. Several methods have been proposed to classify
wave energy systems. The classification system proposed by Falcao (2009) is based
mainly upon the principle of operation.
The energy in a deep water wave of length λ and amplitude a is:
E = ½ ρ g λ a2 per unit breadth of crest.
For a random sea of significant height Hs and zero crossing period Tz , the energy
is:
E = ½ Hs 2Tz kW per meter of crest.
Half of this energy appears as vertical motion, and half as horizontal motion. At
least in deep enough water, the wave particle motion reduces exponentially with depth.
The main importance of this is that a surface device can exploit the difference in
particle motion between it and a deeply submerged object to extract power rather than
having to be rigidly connected to the bottom of the ocean.

Fig. 1: Wave Energy convertor Fig. 2: Wave Energy convertor

(Falling water column) (Rising water column)

The potential of wave energy would be much greater with an average power on the
order of 100 KW per meter of wavefront (100 MW per kilometer) available for
extraction. This average value varies widely between winter and monsoon seasons,
with the range from calm to stormy waves being on the order of 20 to around 200 KW
per meter. In practice, generating of the order of 10 megawatts from a kilometer of
400 R.C. Sharma & Niharika Sharma

wavefront might be feasible. Assuming that 5 % of coastal wavefront were intercepted,

the total wave power practically available could not exceed the order of 3750 MW.
This limitation might be overcome with floating offshore wave generators, which
would in effect increase the length of intercepted wavefront.
India has experimented with a 150-kW wave energy system at
Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) in 1983. The system average output was 25 kW during
December–March and 75 kW during April– November in 1983 [6] and Vizhingam
wave energy pilot project in Kerala. The wave energy pilot project at Vizhingam, an
undertaking of the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) at IIT-Madras,
aims to gather technical data on the oscillating-water column (OWC) concept. The
average wave potential along the Indian coast is around 5–10 kW/m. India has a
coastline of approximately 7500 km. Even a 10% utilization would mean a resource of
3750– 7500MW [7]. However though prototypes have been built and some operating
experience obtained, this is not yet a commercially available technology. A wave
energy plant installed by NIOT currently yields 6–7 kW to produce 7000–8000 litres
of desalinated water per day [8]. The obstacles to wave power production are mainly
technical: a design which will withstand the battering of waves, cost of special
materials and techniques for construction and maintenance of equipment and
infrastructure in corrosive environment as well as the problems related to efficiency
and source variability.

Fig. 3: Low temperature desalination plant.

3. Tidal Energy
Tidal energy could only meet a small portion of India’s energy needs due to limited
potential sites. The potential sites are the Gulf of Kutch (estimated potential of 1200
MW), Gulf of Cambay (7000 MW) and the Durgaduani Creek in the Sundarbans Delta
(100 MW) [9]. The first Indian plant of 3.65MW capacity is being installed in the
Energy from the Ocean and Scope of its Utilization in India 401

Durgaduani creek in Sunderbans (tidal range 3 m). Most recently, India joined the tidal
power wave with the approval of a commercial-scale tidal power plant in the Gulf of
Kutch. The 50 Mw plant will be developed by the London-based company Atlantis
Resources Corporation in partnership with Gujarat Power Corporation, and
construction will start this year. The plant will be the first of its kind in Asia.

Fig. 4: Tidal current Energy converters: Twine turbine horizontal axis device (left),
cross-flow device (middle) and vertical axis device (right). Design by NREL.

4. Ocean Thermal Energy

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) extracts solar energy through a heat
engine operating across the temperature difference between warm surface water and
cold deep water. In the tropics, surface waters are above 80oF, but at ocean depths of
about 1,000 meters, water temperatures are just above freezing everywhere in the
ocean. This provides a 45 to 50 oF temperature differential that can be used to extract
energy from the surface waters[10]. The most optimistic expectations for OTEC
predict a cost on the order of ten times greater than for conventional fossil sources. If
OTEC can ever be made cost effective, India is ideally situated to use it, with its large
length of coastline adjacent to the deep off-shore water of the Indian ocean.

Fig. 5: OTEC Technology and Fig. 6: Rankine Cycle based OTEC

applications. power plant.
402 R.C. Sharma & Niharika Sharma

The India OTEC program started in 1980 to install a 20 MW plant off the Tami
Nadu coast and in 1982, an OTEC cell was formed in National Institute of Ocean
Technology (NIOT). A preliminary design was also completed in 1984 for a 1 MW
closed Rankine cycle floating plant with ammonia as working fluid. In 1997,
Government of India proposed to establish a 1 MW gross OTEC plant. To develop this
project, India researchers have been exploring the participation of international
expertise for a joint research and development. Based on the temperature and
bathymetric profiles, the optimization of the closed loop system was done with the
help of Saga University in 1998.

5. Conclusion
Ocean energy represents a significant opportunity to address the growing need for
energy and the problems associated with traditional fossil fuels. There is significant
room for innovation and for more routine engineering development in energy
harvesting and conversion devices and in all of the infrastructure required to support
the construction, installation, maintenance and decommissioning of these systems.The
excitement about alternative energy suggests that ocean energy oriented projects might
be a similar opportunity, though perhaps on a smaller scale. The technology may take
decade to mature but ocean energy is an option worth pursuing.

6. Acknowledgements
Author R.C. Sharma is grateful to management and administration, Dronacharya
College of Engineering Gurgaon for providing R & D atmosphere and encouragement
during the work.

References

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Energy from the Ocean and Scope of its Utilization in India 403

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