Powering India’s Blue Economy through ocean energy

Abstract

ABSTRACT With an increasing demand for ocean resources to fulfil the needs of an ever growing population, humanity has been pushed to utilise the ocean resources. To be successful in these efforts, they have been pushing technological development which in turn has increased the demand for power as most of these developments are power hungry. However, with the present power generation knowledge confined to fossil-fuel, achieving sustainability has been limited and a challenge to achieve. To overcome this limitation and to harness the full potential of the ocean-based Blue Economy, countries around the world, including India, are making concerted efforts to develop sustainable technologies to generate usable power from ocean-energy. Accordingly, the options available for utilising ocean-based renewable energy technologies to sustainably power growth through economic activities in the marine and coastal domain while being a meaningful contributor to the blue economic growth is discussed. In doing so, a global perspective of the status of the Blue Economy of marine renewable energy technologies with a focus on the opportunities for India has been provided. The article concludes with some suggestions of future developments for developing countries like India to meet the targets of powering their Blue Economy.