A consortium of Global OTEC, a UK-based pioneer in ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) development, and the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN) has been selected to study a site in the Bahamas for OTEC.
This has been requested by the Government of the Bahamas to provide an evidence base for a go or no-go decision on advancing OTEC toward project implementation.
According to Global OTEC, the lead technical partner, over 90% of electricity in the Bahamas is generated from imported diesel and heavy fuel oil, leaving households and businesses exposed to volatile international fuel prices and some of the highest electricity tariffs in the Caribbean.
The feasibility study will assess integration with seawater reverse osmosis, seawater district cooling, and data center cooling alongside the core power system, as well as matters related to environmental and social concerns and considerations.
The work, commissioned by Expertise France and financed by the EU, is implemented under the Euroclima program as part of the EU’s support to the energy sector, recognized as a key sector under the EU’s Global Gateway Investment Agenda for the region.
It builds on a NOAA temperature and salinity measurement campaign conducted off Eleuthera in 2023 using an autonomous seaglider, which collected profiles from the surface to 900 meters and confirmed the presence of a substantial thermal gradient in the water column, the UK firm said.
“Any renewable technology can produce electrons, but only one of them also delivers a valuable cooling and drinkable water resource as a byproduct. That is the difference between OTEC and everything else in a tropical island context. In The Bahamas you have huge thermal resource, the subsea connectivity and a government that has been willing to do the groundwork through progressive studies. Our role over the next year is to establish, with real data and engineering, whether a site can carry a first-of-a-kind installation for the Caribbean,” said Dan Grech, Founder and CEO of Global OTEC.
This follows Global OTEC’s memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Barbados Investment and Development Corporation (BIDC), signed in June 2025, and the technical leadership of PLOTEC, the EU-funded project that designed and tested a storm-resilient floating OTEC platform structure for deployment in weather-exposed waters. PLOCAN coordinated the PLOTEC project and hosted the testing of the OTEC prototype at its offshore test site.
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