Marine tidal current systems: State of the art

The Ocean, which covers two-thirds of the world, captures and stores huge amounts of energy. Several sources of energy can be used. This paper presents a brief review of state of the art on the marine tidal current generation technology. The purposes are as follow: the first part concerns the conversion of marine current energy into mechanical energy, a synthesis of the existing methods of the modeling of the resource and of the marine current turbine are presented. The second part is dedicated to the conversion of the mechanical energy to electrical energy by taking into account the power converters for the control and the grid connection. Some simulation results are briefly shown for each part.