Introduction to wave power

Wave power, resulting from the transfer of energy from wind into water, represents a large potential source of energy for the UK, Europe and some other parts of the World, see Figure 1 . The wave power around the UK and Eire has an estimated annual average of 120GW [1]. When factors such as the need to avoid heavy shipping areas, the need to leave space between devices and the inability of devices to capture all of the incident energy are taken into consideration the technical resource may be of the order of 25GW. The technically achievable total world potential might be around 2000GW.