Science Friday - Why Hasn’t Wave Energy Gotten Its Sea Legs Yet?

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

We've figured out how to harness renewable energy from many natural systems, like solar, wind, and geothermal power. But what about the ocean’s waves? It might seem like converting wave power into electricity on a large scale would’ve been figured out by now, but the tech is actually just getting its sea legs. Why has it been so hard to develop? And just how promising is it?Host Flora Lichtman talks with Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter Jes Burns, who reported on Oregon’s massive wave energy test site; and then she checks in with Deborah Greaves, an  offshore renewable energy researcher, for a look at what’s happening in the rest of the world.Guests: Jes Burns is a science and environment reporter and host of "All Science. No Fiction." at Oregon Public Broadcasting.Dr. Deborah Greaves is a professor of ocean engineering at the University of Plymouth in England.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Flor Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the show, the quest to generate electricity from the ocean. Waves have a huge amount of energy in them, but they move slow. Solar, wind, geothermal, we've figured out how to harness energy from many natural Earth systems. But what about waves? You'd think that converting wave power to electricity on a mass scale might have been figured out by now. But the tech is actually just getting its sense. sea legs. So why has this been so hard to develop and just how promising is it? We're starting off

first with a look at one of the biggest wave energy projects in the world with the help of Jess Burns, science and environment reporter at OPB and host of All Science No Fiction based in Portland, Oregon. Jess, welcome back to Science Friday. Oh, thank you for having me. So you've reported on this wave energy testing site. It's off the coast of Oregon. Help me picture it, first of all. Well, it's kind of hard to picture because it's pretty invisible out in the ocean, right? So basically, okay, picture in your mind a giant rectangle that's like one by two miles big, roughly. That rectangle is then divided into four equal parts. And each one of those parts is considered a birth for wave energy testing. And so four different companies can come in. in and deploy their buoys there. Oh, so they're floating? Yeah, they're floating but tethered to the bottom.

How about that? Now, what you don't see is that along the bottom there is infrastructure that's basically a place where these wave energy devices can hook into these cables that can transport the electricity they produce and all the data about how the different buoys are performing. along a cable back to shore where the developers can kind of look at the performance, assess what's happening, how things are holding up, and then also feed that electricity onto the grid. So the waves are bumping into this tech, and that is getting converted through these different devices that are being tested into power that's then going back through this cable. Right. And, you know, that is the big challenge. of wave energy production is that waves have a huge amount of energy in them, but they move slow, right?

And it's really hard to produce the electricity. And so one of the challenges these wave energy developers are doing and they're approaching it in all different kinds of ways is figuring out the best way to most efficiently capture the most amount of electricity from these slow-moving. waves off the Oregon coast and send them back to shore. And so that's one of the reasons why this technology is in its infancy. And is this why we need a testing facility like this? Oh, yeah. Because we haven't figured out that translation yet. Right, right. And, you know, think about wind energy, right? If I say a wind turbine, you have a picture in your mind. So what's that picture? It's the three blades on the big stock. I can picture it. I can picture it. Clearly, yeah.

So we've had hundreds of years of technological development that have refined that and refined that that we now know the most efficient way to capture energy from the wind is this model, the classic windmill that you see all over the country. There's not going to be much variation. Well, with wave energy, there just hasn't been the opportunity to test. And realistically, testing out in the ocean is far more difficult than testing on land because you have the ocean, which is so unpredictable, right? And how do you get out there? If the weather's bad, you can't get out there, notoriously tough, always moving. Corrosive. Corrosive, right?

You have the salt issue. You have biofowling, that issue that you don't have to deal with on land. And so. Biofowling, like animals? living? Yes, like you put something in the ocean and within days you start getting larva of stuff attaching to it and like growing muscles and things like that, right? You just can't get around that. And so all of these challenges have to be solved for. And the idea of having a dedicated place that these developers can come in and basically plug and play without having to go through all like

the permitting process that it takes to get approved to do this kind of testing out in the ocean is just invaluable. Who paid for this facility? Mostly federal funding. Yes. It's an $80 million facility and they have been building it for 12 to 15 years or so or they have been in the stages of planning it for about that long. Have the cuts to federal funding for clean energy and the sort of de-incentivizing?

of renewable energies affected this facility? Well, Dan Helene, who is the director of PACWave right now, he has said that wave energy hasn't been targeted in the same way that wind and solar has. But in my reporting, I did see that companies were really facing challenges because of cuts to federal funding. I featured in a story that I did an outfit called Aquaharmonics. They were working on a federal grant. They had received half the money. The administration changed over.

And the rest of the money just never came through. And this was money they were already awarded and guaranteed. And basically they had already planned for and that went away. And this company, it's a very small company. And they basically shut down at the end of June when their grant was up. Other companies have still moved forward. Packwave says that there are three people signed up right now to test with them, and two of them are expected to be in the ocean, basically by next fall.

Do you need certain ocean characteristics for wave energy? You do. You want big waves. You want consistency in big waves. And Oregon really has this in droves. It's kind of, you know, the luck of geobes. the luck of wind, the luck of currents, like all of these conditions come together to produce one of the areas of the world with the highest wave energy potential. And also, Oregon has the coastal infrastructure that is needed, basically, for the development of this. So basically, we have power lines and distribution centers along the coast and enough, like, density of communities that that infrastructure is there.

that Packway is able to hook back into. Well, what is that potential? I mean, how much power do people think this facility could realistically bring to Oregon? Well, this one is rated for 20 megawatts. And I did the conversion right before I got all of you. It's enough power to power between 10 and 20,000 homes. So in the grand scheme of energy production, kind of small potato. and that would be at maximum capacity.

Now, realistically, the amount of power produced will be far lower than that, but this grid connectedness is really what separates PACWave from all of the other wave energy test facilities out there. It's larger than the other facilities in the United States. There's one off of Hawaii. There's one under construction in Southern California, a smaller one. And there's also a small facility or area, at least off of North Carolina, I believe, that where testing can happen at a very small scale. But even in Europe, like the big boy is on Orkney Island and Scotland.

Like, it's a huge facility for testing ocean energy technology, but they still don't have the level of grid connectedness that Packwave have. So that's a huge advantage for American developers. I mean, beyond PACWave, do people think that their wave energy could have a meaningful dent in power production? I mean, the idea would be a utility scale function. And I think a lot of the companies are working towards that. There's a few different options. One, it's for like powering remote sensors out in the ocean. So powering a tsunami detection buoy, right? The United States has a. a fleet of these out in the ocean. And they have to go out and switch out batteries, right? Constantly. Basically, like those mini solar panels that you see on the side of the highway. Exactly. So you could power something very small right there where the rest of the device is.

The other option would be so you have an island, a remote community in Alaska. Why not put a wave energy like a small array out there to help produce power for an island? you're around an island, you have waves, like that kind of use case. And then I've also seen some really interesting ideas about not using wave energy to actually produce power for the grid, but instead to directly power things like desalination, which is highly energy intensive. That makes sense. I mean, you know, clearly there are big challenges. Does wave energy have advantages over something like? solar or wind because, you know, for instance, the waves never stop coming.

Well, that's exactly it. The waves never stop because there's not always wind in the ocean, but there's pretty much always swells because somewhere out in the ocean, there was wind, right? And those waves travel. I mean, solar, the obvious thing is you're producing during the day and not during the night. The waves never turn off. There are definitely advantages to wave energy systems as, you know, especially when you start thinking about it working in conjunction with these other renewables, they're really kind of, they're really nicely complimentary. Right. Pack we've got some good news last month from a giant power transmitter.

Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So Bonneville Power Administration, which is one of the major players on the West Coast for transmission lines, they have formed an agreement with the local public utility district along the Oregon coast that's near Packwave to purchase that 20 megawatts of power as it is produced. That's big news because it's basically a guaranteed way that the facilities and the developers could recoup some of the money that it takes to run the facility. And it also basically is a really great way to show on the ground how this could work, right?

You know, if that power wasn't able to feed onto those lines, then having grid connectivity doesn't actually matter. Right. But the fact that you have some place for this power to go and then see how that power plays in the energy mix is going to be invaluable for PACWave for sure. But I think also to just the larger development of wave energy in the United States. Jess Burns is a science and environment reporter at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jess, thanks for chatting. All right, thank you. Don't go away because after the break, why developing this technology is so difficult.

For wave energy, there's no sort of half measures. You have to design your machine to survive in the marine environment today from day one. Now, to give us a look at what's happening with wave energy outside the U.S. and what's on the horizon for this technology is Deborah Greaves, Professor of Ocean Engineering at the University of Plymouth in England. She researches offshore renewable energy.

Deborah, welcome to Science Friday. Hello, thank you very much for having me. So we just got a picture of wave energy in the U.S. You know, progress is happening, but obviously a lack of support from the federal government right now. What are countries outside of the U.S. doing in this space? Okay, well, in the U.K., we have research programs,

investigating wave energy. There are other bodies within the UK such as Wave Energy Scotland that support Wave Energy and elsewhere in Europe and elsewhere around the world. So examples of that are the core power is a wave energy company that's come through from Sweden and they've recently secured European funding and have plans for a large array project. Another example is M4 device, which has been developed through Manchester University in the UK, and that's recently been deployed at sea at the demonstration site in Albany and Australia. And are these all testing facilities, like the one we heard about in Oregon?

They are, yes, wave energy hasn't really got to commercial stage in the same way as offshore wind. a lot of new concepts being investigated in the research stage and in the laboratory. You know, there's not much federal appetite for supporting this tech in the U.S. right now. Is there more enthusiasm for developing it abroad? Well, I think Wave Energy is challenging because it's still got a high price point in comparison with other offshore renewables. So there's a lot of investment going into deep water solutions and floating offshore, solutions. Wave energy and tidal stream are necessary parts of our future energy mix, but they're not quite ready or in the same way for commercialisation at all. They're not securing the same amount

of funding. Do you think they're necessary? Yes, so I think one of the aspects of moving to a renewable energy system is that those renewables come from natural sources, which are variable. and so in order to have a resilient system, you really need to have a diversity of resources. So if we think of solar, which obviously is operating when the sun shining, but not when it's not, wind, which operates invariably,

and it's not always windy. But if we combine the two together, we get better resilience and a better coverage of electricity throughout the day and throughout the seasons. But with, wave energy and tidal stream as well added into the mix, that just gives us much greater resilience. And as a result, if we have that sort of diverse mix of resources, solar, wind, wave and tidal,

then together we have much more resilience. And some studies that have shown that in fact, you can, by adding wave and tidal energy into the energy system, you can reduce the overall cost of over provision that would otherwise be needed, and also reduce the overall cost of the amount of storage that you'd need without those additional types of energy generation. So that's the pitch to people who say, well, we don't need this. It's a piece of the puzzle. Yeah, it's an important piece of the puzzle,

and it will reduce the overall energy system cost. And it will also provide an important opportunity for a new sector, a new growth market as well. Yeah, and domestic production of energy, right? Yes, exactly. Domestic production, energy security, as well as potential export. But, yes, when we think about energy security and energy resilience, it's really important to have those different components of the system.

What do you think people miss about wave energy? In general, people are often very positive about wave energy. Certainly in the UK, people are living on the coast, see all of that power. in the waves and just think, you know, well, why can't we access that, all that raw power? Can't we harness that in some way? But I think it is a real challenge to design engineering solutions to both producing the electricity, but also to be able to survive the storms when the storms come along. So we want them to be activated by the waves when we want them to operate, but a wave farm can't

sort of move out of the way when the big storm comes. comes along. So it's quite a design challenge. For wave energy, there's no sort of half measures. You can't really do that onshore. So you have to design your machine to survive in the marine environment from day one. Yeah. And the power of the ocean is also a pitfall. Exactly. Deborah Greaves is a professor of ocean engineering at the University of Plymouth in England, and she's also the director of the Supergen offshore renewable energy hub. Deborah, thanks for talking to me today. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Today's episode was produced by D. Peter Schmidt. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.