Renewable Energy in Malaysia

ORGANIZED BY UNIVERSITI TENAGA NASIONAL, BANGI, SELANGOR, MALAYSIA; 28-30 AUGUST 2006

Prospects for Ocean Energy in Malaysia
Omar Yaakob, Tengku Mohd Ariff Bin Tengku Ab Rashid, Mohamad Afifi Abdul Mukti
Department of Marine Technology Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 81310 UTM Skudai MALAYSIA Email: [e-mail]

Keywords: alternative, renewable energy Abstract

European Union [4], the United States [5], [6] and Japan [7]. The energy can be extracted in the form of:

The ocean one of the most perpetual sources of energy and has already been exploited on a small scale. Some technologies are being developed to exploit the large potential of this energy source. This paper will focus on ocean energy as an alternative source in Malaysia. The current development of various devices to extract the ocean energy will be reviewed. Although technologies are currently being developed in the areas of tidal power, wave power, thermal energy gradient, current energy, winds and salinity gradient, not all of these are suitable for Malaysian sea areas. This paper surveys the available Malaysian oceanographic data and identifies the potential sources of energy.

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Thermal Difference Tides Waves Ocean Current Salinity gradient

The concept being developed for each category will be briefly explained in the following sections. 2.1 Ocean Thermal Energy Ocean thermal energy is based on the principle of thermodynamics, that is useful work can be generated when a fluid can be kept at two different temperatures. In this case, temperature difference between the surface waters and colder waters found at ocean depths may reach 20 degrees Celcius; large enough to generate work through a turbine. Good descriptions of the system, called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC), are given in [8], [9] and [10]. Figure 1 shows a schematic view of the concept.

1. Introduction
The world energy consumption is always on the rise. Our

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