Abstract

This study aims to introduce and discuss the recent research, development and application of wave energy marine buoys. The topic becomes increasingly appealing after the observation that wave energy technologies have been evolving in the recent decades, yet have not reached convergence. The power supply is usually the bottleneck for marine distributed systems such as buoys. Wave energy technologies are especially useful in this sense, as they can capture and convert the promising “native” renewable energy in the ocean (i.e., wave energy) into electricity. The paper enumerates the recent developments in wave energy capture (e.g., oscillating bodies) and power take-off (e.g., nanogenerators). The study also introduces the typical marine buoys and discusses the applicability of wave energy technologies on them. It is concluded that the wave energy technologies could be implemented as a critical addition to the comprehensive power solution of marine distributed systems. Wave energy buoys are likely to differentiate into “wave energy converter buoys” and “wave-energy-powered buoys”, which is indicated by the ratio of the generated power to the load power.