Abstract
The blue economy is the recent initiative among Indian Ocean realm association (IORA) countries, ASEAN and Caribbean Islands focusing towards sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improvised livelihoods and jobs and preserving ocean ecosystem health. High-density population resides in coastal and islandic regions of these countries and with climate change, rising sea level is seen an imminent danger to the coastal community in the low-lying area. To counter the rising sea level, countries are looking for technologies to support the displaced coastal population by embarking on floating homes and floating cities in their Blue Growth strategy to support living space and amenities needs. Since these floating homes and cities are powered through fossil fuel there is a need to preserve the Coastal marine ecology from the emissions. This paper discusses about powering the floating homes through ocean based floating clean energy systems as a cost-effective energy system that can be manufactured, assembled and maintained in the onshore and easily towed and deployed at a specific ocean site and assure energy security and resilience even during natural disasters. In addition, the paper discusses the idea of hybrid renewable powered energy systems to exploit the multiple available energy sources at the specific site viz., tidal, ocean thermal, wave, solar and wind that may vary in different proportion of availability to increase overall energy generation density from the ocean site. To illustrate, a case study of floating tidal system is discussed that was designed and deployed in Singapore towards tropical shallow water conditions through systematic resource assessment, device design through simulation and field based assessment.