Abstract
THE FLORIDA CURRENT—the reach of the Gulf Stream System in the Straits of Florida—offers the potential for renewable base-load power for the energy-hungry southeast Florida metropolitan area, the seventh largest in the U.S. Realization of this potential requires, among other things, a better understanding of both the structure and variations of the flow in order to provide developers of marine hydrokinetic energy conversion devices with information critical to the design process and to quantify more completely the resource itself. To this end, the Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center has deployed Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) at a variety of locations offshore Fort Lauderdale. Resulting current profiles are discussed in this paper, with particular emphasis on observed variability and its implications for power generation.