Potential Area to Harness the Tidal Energy at West Coast Peninsular Malaysia

Malaysia nowadays depends heavily on conventional energy resource for generating electricity and transportation. This will give negative impact and trigger other problems if not well managed. Therefore, it is very important to increase the use of renewable energy especially the tidal energy as the tidal energy is more predictable and reliable renewable energy source. A kinetic energy produced by the tidal differences will be used to generate electricity and involves the use of a tidal turbine. There are two approaches that are being used to harness the tidal energy for the generation of electricity which are barrage approach and tidal stream approach. This paper identify the potential region along west coast of peninsular Malaysia that has higher potential power generation for harnessing tidal energy and study which approach suitable to be applied. From the results, show that the highest potential power generation for harnessing tidal energy is at Pelabuhan Klang with the average power availability is 591.19kW while the lowest is at Tanjung Keling with the average potential power generation is 52.75kW.