Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) Datasets

The data presented here were collected from the Ocean Thermal Extractable Energy Visualization (OTEEV) project. The OTEEV project focused on assessing the Maximum Practicably Extractable Energy (MPEE) from the world's ocean thermal resources.

This project explored the feasibility of deploying Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plants to harness temperature differences between warm surface waters and cold deep seawater for renewable power generation. The resulting datasets - cold water depth, delta T, net power, plant spacing, sea surface temperature, and seawater cooling - capture critical environmental and engineering variables needed to assess OTEC site suitability, system efficiency, and regional deployment planning. Data were processed and converted to shapefile format by NREL for the OTEEV project - see linked "Ocean Thermal Extractable Energy Visualization Final Technical Report" resource below.

For more information on the specific visualization datasets provided here, see section 7.1 of the linked report.

Note: The shapefiles presented here were originally created as a part of the MHK atlas, which has been deprecated in favor of the Marine Energy Atlas. For more up to date datasets, please see the "Marine Energy Atlas" linked resource below.