Abstract
Marine renewable energy presents itself as a reliable, clean and abundant source of energy. However, its harnessing is highly dependent on the local oceanographic and environmental conditions, and there are still many research challenges to produce electric power in a commercial scale. This work strives to build a road map for harnessing marine renewable energy for Colombia, taking into account the study of the most promising oceanographic variables to generate ocean power: waves, tides, currents and saline and thermal gradients. The roadmap must be designed to fulfill several objectives: to have a profound knowledge of the available resource and oceanographic conditions in Colombia, to identify the best opportunities for harnessing the wave resource, to optimize the investment in resources and to minimize the possible environmental impacts. With these objectives in mind, a 4-stage roadmap is proposed, where each stage depends on the results on the previous one, and provides global knowledge of marine energy.