2026-05-05T11:19:00Zhttps://uvadoc.uva.es/oai/request

oai:uvadoc.uva.es:10324/674202024-05-10T10:42:37Zcom_10324_36297com_10324_954com_10324_894col_10324_36298

Samsó, Roger Crespin, Júlia García-Olivares, Antonio Solé, Jordi 2024-05-08T07:01:11Z 2024-05-08T07:01:11Z 2024 Sustainability, Mayo, 2023, n. 15 p. 1-35 https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/67420 10.3390/su15108050 Producción Científica 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 TWh/yr. This figure goes down to 5000TWh/yr 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 20, but excluding offshore wind reduces the average EROI to 8. 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. This work was supported by the European Union through the funding of the MEDEAS and LOCOMOTION projects under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreements No. 691287 and 821105, respectively). application/pdf eng MDPI info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © The authors Attribution 4.0 Internacional Energías renovables Oceanic energy Offshore wind Ocean currents OTEC Tidal SGE Wave 2510.91 Recursos Renovables Examining the potential of marine renewable energy: a net energy perspective info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/10/8050 SI