Electrical Power Supply of Remote Maritime Areas: A Review of Hybrid Systems Based on Marine Renewable Energies

Ocean energy holds out great potential for supplying remote maritime areas with their energy requirements, where the grid size is often small and unconnected to a continental grid. Thanks to their high maturity and competitive price, solar and wind energies are currently the most used to provide electrical energy. However, their intermittency and variability limit the power supply reliability. To solve this drawback, storage systems and Diesel generators are often used. Otherwise, among all marine renewable energies, tidal and wave energies are reaching an interesting technical level of maturity. The better predictability of these sources makes them more reliable than other alternatives. Thus, combining different renewable energy sources would reduce the intermittency and variability of the total production and so diminish the storage and genset requirements. To foster marine energy integration and new multisource system development, an up-to-date review of projects already carried out in this field is proposed. This article first presents the main characteristics of the different sources which can provide electrical energy in remote maritime areas: solar, wind, tidal, and wave energies. Then, a review of multi-source systems based on marine energies is presented, concerning not only industrial projects but also concepts and research work. Finally, the main advantages and limits are discussed.