IRENA to Host Ocean Energy Workshop at Energy3

In partnership with energy3: Canada’s Energy Conference, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will host a workshop on October 16th, day one of the conference: “Coupling ocean energy with other sectors: Innovative business models and complementarities with renewable offshore technologies.”

After decades of efforts from some governments, industry, entrepreneurs and research centres, ocean energy technologies (OET) -including wave, tidal, OTEC and salinity gradient- are yet to reach the commercialisation stage and scale-up deployment. When looking into the economics around OET, based on the levelized cost of electricity indicator, it seems to be that the gap between OET and other renewable power generation technologies continues to be rather big. However, currently some efforts are observed in the direction of finding additional revenue streams associated with the deployment of OET, in addition to selling electricity, which may help to strengthen their business case.

This workshop will introduce novel pathways to couple ocean energy technologies with other energy sectors. In the first part of this session, industry experts will discuss business models that can enable new revenue streams for ocean energy projects; as it is the case of ocean power generation coupled with aquaculture, water cooling, ancillary services (e.g: through energy storage), hydrogen production and storage, among others.

In the second half, the discussion will highlight ocean energy complementarities with offshore renewable energy technologies such as offshore wind, floating PV and floating wind, with an emphasize on how ocean energy and offshore technologies can work together, benefiting from synergies across the project development and deployment phases.

Objective/focus:

• Provide international view of renewable energy around the world and how ocean energy development plays a role;
• Influence of innovative business models in achieving industrial roll-out;
• Leveraging complementarities between ocean energy and renewable energy offshore technologies;

This workshop takes place on Day 1, October 16, of the conference.