Waves of renewable energy
Creating waves of climate action is one thing, but what about companies that create renewable energy with actual waves?
Catching the renewable energy wave
Fossil fuels currently represent 80% of the world's energy supply, which comes at an immense environmental cost. Energy itself accounts for over 75% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. It's tough to envision a Net Zero future without a progressive phase-out of fossil fuels.
Reaching 2050 Net Zero targets will require a fundamental overhaul of global energy systems, reducing the world's reliance on fossil fuels as well as significantly increasing the financing and development of renewable energy capabilities.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), annual clean energy investments would need to reach $4 trillion by 2030 if we are to reach Net Zero. These investments amounted to $1.7 trillion globally in 2023, so there is still a long road ahead.
In the IEA's Net Zero future, electricity is at the forefront of the energy system, powering transportation, supporting infrastructure and enabling industrial production. By 2030, 60% of the world's electricity would need to come from renewables.
Renewable energy supply rose by 8% in 2022, making up 5.5% of the world's energy supply. You will know the main renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal, but there are also exciting developments like wave energy.
Creating energy from waves
Waves are caused by tides and winds impacting the water's surface. With the creation of these waves comes a lot of energy that can be captured by various technologies to generate electricity. Some of these are:
Point absorbers: These are buoys that can float at the surface of the water or be submerged. As the waves come and go, this creates pressure that mechanical energy converters leverage to drive alternators producing electricity.
Oscillating wave surge converters: With fixed physical infrastructure mounted on the seabed, an oscillating flap is at the ocean's surface and harnesses the energy generated by the waves. The rotational motion can drive an electricity-producing generator.
Oscillating water columns: Hollow structures with an opening below the water surface are filled up by water as the waves come and go. This pushes air up and down the column. The air is then leveraged to spin a turbine to ultimately generate electricity.
While these technologies provide encouraging opportunities to generate renewable energy from the ocean, their deployment has yet to scale globally, and they have faced roadblocks preventing them from being widely commercially available.
A Portuguese case study
Owned by Energias de Portugal, the first wave energy project was launched in 2006, 5 kilometres off the Portuguese coast. The technology to convert wave energy into electricity was developed by the company Pelamis.
By 2008, phase one of the project generated 2.25 MW of electricity, enough to power 1,500 homes. It was then expected to scale to generate 22.5 MW of electricity to power 15,000 homes in Portugal. However, the project never made it to the next phase of development.
The first phase of the project cost €8.2m and involved three generators. Unfortunately, they encountered technical difficulties within four months of operations and had to be repaired. It couldn't have come at a worse time, as the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis led to a shutdown of the project.
Failing to secure additional investment to develop their technology, Pelamis went into administration in 2014. More widely in the industry, technologies with cumulative generation capacities of 24.9 MW of electricity have been installed since 2010.
Players such as CorPower Ocean, NoviOcean and Seabased have been working to make waves in the industry and ensure wave energy can be one of the decarbonisation technologies we leverage on the journey to Net Zero.
The limitations and potential of wave power
Wave energy has immense potential to decarbonise energy production. In the United States alone, waves could generate 2.64 trillion kWh. That represents 64% of the electricity generated by the country's utilities in 2021.
However, with 24,900 kWh of wave energy installed globally, we are currently way off wave power being a major renewable energy source. One of the blockers has been the high costs of building wave energy plants and ensuring they can be connected to power grids.
The development of wave energy projects can also present risks for marine ecosystems if potential issues are not considered in equipment design and deployment. The equipment could disorient marine wildlife, impact migrations and cause behavioural changes in certain species.
In the IEA's Net Zero projections, most emissions reductions achieved between now and 2030 come from commercially available technologies. Reductions past 2030 and into 2050 will rely on technologies that are still nascent or in growth stages.
This could imply an influx of financing for technologies capturing wave energy. We can only hope these developments will create waves of climate action and clean electricity generated by waves!
