Page 7 - Fundamentals of Ocean Renewable Energy Generating Electricity From The Sea

xiv Preface

and students and researchers of marine renewable energy, over the last decade.
We felt that a unified text would be suited to those transferring into the marine
renewable energy sector from related disciplines, for example, other engineering
or energy sectors, where a detailed explanation of the marine renewable energy
resource, and ways that the resource can be measured and modelled, would be
useful. In addition, students enrolled at both undergraduate and postgraduate
levels would find a single text invaluable in helping with those aspects of their
studies that relate to marine renewable energy; for example, students of civil
engineering, energy engineering, mechanical engineering, ocean engineering,
or oceanography.
Both authors are from civil engineering backgrounds, with particular
expertise in fluid dynamics and modelling, but have evolved over the last
15–20 years into practicing shelf sea oceanographers. Simon Neill is a Reader
in Physical Oceanography in the School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor University
(UK), and is founder and course director of an MSc in Marine Renewable
Energy. He has published around 70 peer-reviewed journal articles, half
of which are on the topic of marine renewable energy. He is involved in
many national and international projects, and is a committee member of the
International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), working on revising IEC
Technical Specification 62600-201: Tidal Energy Resource Assessment and
Characterization. M. Reza Hashemi is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Ocean Engineering and Graduate School of Oceanography at the University
of Rhode Island, USA. The University of Rhode Island is the birth place of the
first offshore wind farm in the United States: the Block Island Offshore Wind
Farm, and has several centres for teaching/research regarding renewable energy.
Hashemi has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles, mainly focused
on renewable energy and coastal engineering. He has developed and taught
several undergraduate and graduate courses on Ocean Renewable Energy, and
one of the motivations for this book was to provide a textbook for these courses.
The material in this book is a culmination of both authors teaching and research,
in addition to their experience in working in collaboration with industry.
We thank our colleagues at Bangor University and the University of Rhode
Island for discussions on various topics presented in this book, and for providing
some of the photographs that appear in the chapters. In particular, we wish to
acknowledge the expertise of Matt Lewis (Bangor University) for advice and
discussions on several topics during development of the book, and Annette
Grilli (University of Rhode Island) and Grover Fugate (Rhode Island Coastal
Resources Management Council) for providing insights into offshore wind
energy. We also thank the individuals external to our organizations who have
provided photographs and original high-resolution figures—these are acknowl-
edged individually within the chapters.
This book is arranged into ten chapters that could logically map onto taught
programs in the sequence presented. References are provided at the end of each
chapter for further reading. The introduction (Chapter 1) provides the context