The world’s energy consumption has been increasing and global warming has been getting more serious. Because of this, eco-friendly energy policies are being established in Korea.Especially, Korean energy policy has been changed with the beginning of nuclear power phaseout and development of new and renewable energy. There has been a lot of interests in the development of marine energy. Among marine energy technology, tidal current energy is the closest technology to the commercialization. In particular, the southwestern coast of Korea is the candidate site for the development of tidal current energy. Because there are strong velocities occurring between islands. MOF(Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries) has planned for the Strategic Plan for Development and Support of New and Renewable Energy such as Ocean Energy in 2017.
Meanwhile, KIOST(Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology) is developing sea test bed for tidal current energy converters at Jang-Juk strait and Uldolmok. And MOF is supporting the construction projects of the open sea test sites for tidal current energy converters from 2017. Thus, in this paper, establishment plan for sea test bed is introduced. The sea test bed was titled K-TEC(Korea Tidal current Energy Center). The project for open sea test bed with 5 berths of 4.5 MW grid-connected capacity for the tidal energy converters is scheduled from April 2017 to December 2022 by KIOST.