EARTH IS A BIG BALL OF WASTED POTENTIAL—energy potential, that is. Winds race across fields devoid of turbines, sunlight crashes against black asphalt shingles, and ocean waves beat unceasingly against coastlines around the world. And while billions of dollars and many decades have created whole industries dedicated to harnessing those first two sources of free, renewable energy, tapping into the rhythmic heartbeat of the world’s oceans has proven to be a bigger challenge.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the theoretical annual energy potential of crashing waves along the U.S. coast is some 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours, or roughly two-thirds of the country’s total utility generation in 2021. While squeezing every ounce of these kilowatt hours from the ocean is likely impossible, wave energy could still account for around 10–20 percent of the U.S.’s renewable energy mix.
And grid energy is only one application for these wave energy converters (WECs). Companies like Oregon-based C-Power are developing devices that bring a “power strip and ethernet cable to the ocean,” according to its CEO Reenst Lesemann.
“[The ocean] is our biggest, best, and most flexible battery that we have,” Lesemann says. “If you can’t tap that battery, it’s a power desert.”
C-Power is one of the many companies looking to revolutionize how we explore and power the world’s oceans, and it hopes to test its machines, the SeaRAY and the utility-grade StingRAY, at PacWave. Supported by a collection of government, state, and federal grants, PacWave will be the first wave energy testing facility in the continental U.S. and one of only a few similar facilities around the globe. Based in Newport, Oregon, it will play a central role in figuring out what does and doesn’t work—and hopefully focus the industry to unleash its long-awaited affordable ocean energy revolution.
Today, expensive boats provide mere kilowatts of power and limit research time for exploring some of the planet’s most vulnerable ecosystems. Wave energy could provide limitless electrons for deep-sea missions, deliver off-shore power to far-flung coastal communities, feed always-on sensors designed to probe deep sea habitats, and enhance thousands of wind turbines already anchored offshore, all while creating a crucial renewable energy safety net when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
So while solar and wind energy are breaking records on the regular, why has wave energy lagged behind? Turns out, it isn’t easy building machines in the ocean.
THE FIRST ATTEMPT AT CAPTURING WAVE POWER didn’t really arrive until the 1970s, when the U.K. began investing in alternative means of energy following the 1973 Oil Crisis, an oil embargo placed on the U.S. during the Arab-Israeli war that same year. Pioneering this research was Stephen Salter, a professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh who designed dynamically shaped floats called “ducks” (so named because the device bobbed up and down in the water like some kind of energy-harnessing waterfowl).
Although it had funding for seven years, the nascent wave-energy program known as “Salter’s Duck” never delivered on its renewable energy promise due to government indifference and the arrival of plentiful and cheap oil in the 1980s.
Despite its unrealized promises, Salter and his floating “ducks” planted the seeds of a possible wave energy future.
“From my perspective, [Salter’s Duck] kicked off the modern wave energy converter field,” says Michael Lawson, Ph.D., marine energy group manager for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) water power research and development program. “You saw a slow, minimal investment in R&D of the technology until the early 2000s, where you saw some significant investment in Europe in tidal and wave energy technologies.”
From this rush of alternative energy investment came companies like Wavebob, Pelamis, Aquamarine, and many more that designed wave energy devices of all shapes and sizes—and if they were lucky, deployed them. But in the end, all three companies met the same fate. Whether put into receivership, bankruptcy, or otherwise going defunct, none of them could deliver on the wave-power dream.
And this is where an accreditation facility like PacWave becomes essential.
“PacWave will be able to go in … and figure out how to characterize the performance, to measure power, forces, and loads, and be able to find what works for moorings,” says NREL’s Arlinda Huskey, who was previously involved in the accreditation of certification testing at the National Wind Technology Center near Boulder, Colorado. “There are so many things that we need to learn, that we need to figure out if these devices are going to be commercialized.”
PACWAVE IS ACTUALLY TWO TESTING FACILITIES with both a north and south location. The north location, which is already operational, tests smaller prototypes but is in shallower waters, arranged close to port, and isn’t connected to the mainland grid. The south location is where you’ll see lots of “steel in the water,” according to Dan Hellin, deputy director at PacWave.
When operational in 2025, PacWave south will be capable of hosting 20 wave energy converters. These stations will be further divided into four testing berths, each with their own dedicated transmission cable that’s connected to the Utility Connection and Monitoring Facility on land. Located at the Driftwood Beach State Recreation Site south of Newport, this facility will allow developers to monitor their wave machines in real time. In July 2024, crews began installing cables connecting these testing berths to the mainland grid.
“We’re building the sandbox, and anybody can come and bring their toys to test in the sandbox,” says Burke Hales, Ph.D., a professor at Oregon State University and chief scientist at PacWave. “An opaque and unprovable megawatt is less valuable to you than a verified 500 kilowatt. So we do that monitoring, we verify the power condition.”
Of course, this sandbox isn’t located in a sterile testing environment, but a roiling and diverse natural ecosystem. Creating the testing facility along the Oregon coast, as well as putting experimental devices in its waters, comes with some environmental hazards. Ocean noise can impact marine mammal migration, hardware could entangle wildlife (especially if crab pots migrate to the testing site), and artificial reef structures can create habitats for lingcod and octopus to prey on flatfish like flounder, a species previously safe in this area from such predators.
“So we’ve got a benthic ecosystem monitoring requirement,” Hales says. “We’re out there checking to see if ‘Ok, did the crabs all leave. Did we change who’s living on the seafloor because we put anchors down there.’ So that’s all part of it … we’ve even got plans for mitigating influence on bats.”
However, PacWave is a proving ground for first-of-its kind technologies, and there’s a certain level of unknowns that come with the project—both in terms of what WECs will generate the most watts and also what impact machines will have on surrounding ecosystems.
“Part of the issue is there’s been very few wave energy devices in the world, so there’s been very little research done around them,” Hellin says. “Part of what PacWave is about is to try and monitor the deployment of wave energy devices and answer some of these questions ... you can’t answer them unless you have something in the water.”
ONCE PACWAVE SOUTH GOES ONLINE IN 2025, its experimental kilowatts won’t be confined to a lab. The project is directly tied into the local grid, operated by the Central Lincoln Peoples Utility District (PUD), and will provide energy to the residents of Newport. This will give developers an idea of just how competitive wave energy is compared to other sources. At full capability, PacWave will power the equivalent of 2,000 homes from the electrons produced by ocean waves—a small output that comes with big implications.
While it’s easy to imagine a fleet of these devices bobbing up and down in the waters on the distant horizon, similar to the growing number of wind farms off the European coast, this isn’t the most likely application for WECs in the near term. Less energetic coasts, especially in warm locales or along eastern shores, likely won’t benefit from these devices compared to more turbulent waters in western, colder environments. But even in these choppy seas, WECs could start out with relatively niche applications.
“There’s going to be different uses for it,” Huskey says. “One is sending power back to the mainland … it could be deployed for emergency situations where some location has a hurricane or something … there could be ROVs that are deployed offshore and they just need a charge.”
“My gut tells me that you’ll see at least a few different concepts because the end uses are so different,” Lawson says, also mentioning how remote ocean observation technologies and remote communities could benefit the most. “Utility scale [wave] farms could be combined potentially with a floating offshore wind farm. Those technologies are going to have to be integrated with that wind farm … sharing moorings and anchoring systems with the wind turbines.”
And all of these different WEC permutations—whether powering a research vessel, a benthic sensor array, or an entire onshore community—will get their first real-world test at PacWave. And while other renewable resources continue along in their own energy revolutions, the introduction of wave energy could be another powerful resource that taps into one of the most energetic natural processes on Earth.
“People are hoping that PacWave is going to help trigger the increase in the pace of things,” Hellin says. “Ultimately, you’ve got to be able to test it in the real world, full scale … otherwise you can’t advance to that next stage, right?”
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
