Abstract
Research into alternative clean energy is now a major worldwide endeavour. Wind and Solar energy systems are increasingly popular, in particular, in the sub-tropical and tropical regions and have achieved a level of technology maturity. However, there is an ongoing search for renewable energy sources with low variability and high energy density. Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) fits these criteria and research activity in MRE is roughly doubling every couple of years. The oceans provide energy from waves, tides, currents and from thermal and salinity gradients and so on. Among these, wave and tidal energy have more potential because they are widely spread across the entire ocean basin. Although considerable progress has been made in the fields of wave, tide and ocean thermal energy, there are several issues to be understood, in particular efficiency, power take off and sharing of costs with other viable activities that could go hand in hand. This leads to calls for a forum for researchers to share findings and to discuss topics of mutual interest. Indo-Australian Marine Renewable Energy Workshop (INAMREW) brings together selected researchers and industry in India and Australia to discuss and plan ocean renewable energy developments. The purpose of the workshop is to exchange scientific information, share details on facilities and expertise available for joint research, learn and understand the needs of the industry, plan joint funding applications to appropriate national and bilateral schemes, and plan advocacy for plan ocean renewable energy. The workshop was held in the sprawling campus of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras during 4–5 April 2016. This special edition consists of six selected papers from the workshop including a joint paper co-authored by the key researchers who shared their experiences in the workshop and a key paper on the developments of marine energy in Australia. The other papers detail the numerical estimate of the tidal current energy in Gulf of Khambhat, review of air turbines and optimization for the oscillating water column and review of success of the field deployment of hydrokinetic turbine to extract the current energy and tidal power estimate along with potential harvesting technologies for Indian coast.