Future Research into Hydro-Power

The future of hydro-power is mainly focused on the improvement of methods to capture energy from the ocean.  Conventional methods of collecting energy from rivers and lakes has long been established and most projects are just making the technology bigger and more efficient.  Wave and tidal power plants are still a relatively new technology that needs a considerable amount of research to fully be established.

Dynamic tidal power has the potential to generate huge amounts of power but is currently entirely theoretical.  To fully establish its practicality, there needs to be a full scale project developed which would be very expensive to implement. 

Wave power is still mostly theoretical, there are very few wave power plants currently implemented and no one design has proven to be the most efficient.  For the most part, the field is still developing and not very well established due to the fact that it is a very recent topic.