In the recent years, technological advancements of renewable energy sources are sought with increasing attention, due to the growing awareness of global warming and diminishing of fossil fuel. Hydrokinetic turbines have been increasingly popular, due to promising results. In particular, the vertical axis hydrokinetic turbines are getting much attention because of its design simplicity, easy fabrication and no complex yaw control mechanism required. However, the possible solutions of optimization are yet to be explored and addressed. Hence, the present numerical research conducted an Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (URANS) simulations on a novel blade profile with the J-shaped blade section for hydrokinetic applications. The J-shaped design is theorized to extract lift and drag forces simultaneously, capable of extracting more power compared to conventional turbine designs. In this study, a three-bladed J-shaped turbine has been evaluated for a range of tip speed ratios, and turbine solidity ratios, to analyze their respective effects on the performing factors. The shear stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model solver was used to solve the implicit URANS equations. It was observed, that for three-bladed J-shaped hydrokinetic turbines, a better performance was achieved at lower TSR value of 0.75. It is also observed that an increase in SR had negatively impacted the performance J-shaped hydrokinetic turbines. This is likely due to the decrease in escape-ability of the fluid caught within the notches of the J-shaped blades. From the results, the J-shaped turbine can be considered as a promising turbine to further investigate for the optimization of hydrokinetic applications.