How Waves Could Quietly Overtake Solar & Wind

Every crashing wave delivers a pulse of power. Add them all up and the ocean carries more energy than the roughly 30,000 terawatt hours of electricity that was generated globally in 2023. But for decades, wave power has been a sea of broken dreams, sunk prototypes, busted budgets, and forgotten startups. Until now. In 2023, buoys from a Swedish company called CorePower survived record-breaking 60-foot waves, and kept sending clean power to the grid. They don't just ride the waves, they tune into them, using smart engineering to amplify their motion and squeeze out more energy from every swell. With costs plunging and the first full wave farms on the horizon, a decades-old dream might finally be about to break through. So the question is, is wave energy finally ready for primetime, or will it just be another shipwreck in the history of clean power? I'm Matt Ferrell. Welcome to Undecided. This video is brought to you by Ground News. 2024 marked a milestone in global electricity. For the first time, more than 30% came from renewables like hydropower, solar, and wind. We've harnessed the power of the sun, skies, and rivers, but the ocean's immense energy remains largely untapped. According to the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, wave energy converters, or WECs, installed within 10 miles of the U.S. coastline could generate 770 terawatt-hours annually. That's enough to power 71 million homes and cover 18% of the country's electricity needs as of 2023. Go further offshore and wave energy could potentially supply up to a third of U.S. demand. So why aren't we doing it? Well, it turns out we've been trying, for decades, and have a trail of sunken costs to prove it. OceanLynx, for example, lost two floating generators off the coast of Australia. Then there's Palamas, the sea snake WEC that launched the world's first wave farm in Portugal and folded during the 2008 financial crash. Newer concepts like Eel Energy's undulating membrane show promise, but most never make it past the small-scale testing. In the choppy waters of R&D, funding gaps have scuttled more projects than storms ever did. Part of the challenge is that wave motion isn't the steady push of wind, rivers, or even tides. You can't just stick a turbine in the water and let spinning blades do the work. Throw a rubber duck or a floating WEC into a wave and it follows a looping path, rising and surging forward with the crest, then sinking and drifting back with the trough. After decades of research, we still don't have a single go-to design that can reliably turn those water loop-de-loops into electricity. Whatever design wins out will need to handle more than the open sea. It has to ride out shifting wave heights in periods that survive violent winter storms and endure decades in harsh corrosive marine environments. Testing that design takes permits, subsea electric cables, and yes, money, money, and more money. But once a viable solution is locked in, the potential to deliver clean energy in a world of surging electricity demand is too good to ignore. Wave energy shines where other renewables fall short. According to Stanford researchers, offshore wind in California can stall for around 1,000 hours a year, but the ocean only goes still for 200. Combine wind and wave, and that downtime shrinks to just 100 hours annually. Waves also make a great companion to solar, not just because they roll in 24-7, but because they peak in winter, when the sun is low and solar generation drops. Along the U.S. west coast, wave energy in winter is roughly four times higher than in summer. That reliability has real grid-level benefits. Organizations like Australia's Blue Economy Cooperative Research Center argue that wave energy's consistency can ease our reliance on costly, large-scale battery storage by filling the gaps left by wind and solar. If wave and wind power gets cheaper as expected by 2050, pairing them could reduce the total amount of energy we need to generate for a zero-emissions grid in the western U.S. by as much as 17%. There's also a cost-saving kicker. Co-locating wave energy converters with offshore wind farms, one permit, one survey, shared vessels, shared crews, and most importantly, a shared subsea cable, which is one of the priciest parts of getting offshore electricity to shore. Wave Energy Scotland estimates that pairing a 100MW wave farm with a 500MW wind farm could cut the wind project's capital costs by 7%, and the wave projects by a whopping 40%. Bundle them together and the total costs drop to 12% just by sharing infrastructure and operations. But what happens when a wave startup finally gets it right? How do you turn a floating 30-foot buoy into a resilient power plant? Well, depending on which headlines you read, you'd think wave energy is either the next big thing or a total boondoggle. And that's where today's sponsor, Ground News, comes in. Created by a former NASA engineer, Ground News gathers news from over 50,000 sources, analyzing political bias, credibility, and even financial incentives behind the coverage. A great example is this story about how Trump's tariffs are impacting the stock market and U.S. trading partners. With one click, I can see a summary of political bias, ownership details, and a factuality breakdown of every source that's covering it. For instance, a center-leaning source presents it as a straightforward report. It states the purpose and results without adding judgment. Meanwhile, a left-leaning source takes a more critical stance, framing the heavy financial losses. And a right-leaning source focuses on the 50 nations that are ready to talk trade. As someone who watches my videos, you probably like digging deeper into the facts to understand the bigger picture. Ground News makes it easy to compare coverage, spot bias, and see the full story. One of my favorite features is the blind spot feed, which reveals stories underreported by one side of the political spectrum. It's helped me to recognize blind spots and see the nuance in different stories. For a limited time, you can get the same plan I use for nearly half the price. Just go to ground.news slash undecided or scan the QR code to save 40% off their Vantage plan. I only promote brands I trust and I think you'll find Ground News just as valuable as I do. Thanks to Ground News and to all of you for supporting the channel. Now back to what happens when a wave startup gets it right. Another wave energy contender has raced ahead towards commercialization. In 2018, Swedish company CorePowerOcean tested a prototype at the European Marine Energy Center in Scotland. Think of EMEC as Europe's version of PacWave, except it launched way back in 2003, decades earlier. After Brexit, CorePower relocated to mainland Europe, taking over the very site of the failed Portuguese wave farm I mentioned earlier. By 2023, CorePower's latest commercial scale WEC, rated at 300 kW, was already peaking at 600 kW on the grid. With a few design tweaks, the company now believes a single unit could hit 850 kW. CorePower's 9 meter wide, or about 30 feet buoy, doesn't spin like a turbine. It bobs and pulls. What's known as a point absorber design floats on the surface tethered to the seafloor by a tension mooring line. As waves roll around it, it moves up, down, and side to side, driving a mechanical system inside the buoy that generates electricity. The clever part? A built-in tension system pulls the buoy downward between the crests, letting it harvest energy not just as it rises, but also as it sinks, squeezing more power from every wave cycle. But the real magic is WaveSpring, a resonance tech developed with NTNU that times the buoy's motion to the rhythm of the sea. Like a trampoline jumper sinking every bounce, WaveSpring boosts energy capture even in small waves. In tests, CorePower's buoy moved nearly 3 meters in 1 meter waves. And now CorePower's adding AI control systems to fine-tune performance in real-time. In storms, the system can detune the making it more transparent to the waves, like how turbines feather their blades to spill wind and survive high gusts. CorePower's buoys faced their ultimate stress test when 4 winter storms battered its Portuguese test site. One of those storms brought record-breaking waves up to 18.5 meters high. Yes, those are the 6-story breakers I mentioned earlier. Not only did the 4 buoys survive, but they retuned themselves and resumed delivering power to the grid once the storm passed. That's a major win, but there's another kind of test you can't fast-track ... the test of time. The ocean is a punishing place for machinery. Saltwater corrodes metal, and constant wave motion stresses every moving part. CorePower currently estimates a 20-year lifespan for its buoys, with the potential to stretch that to 25 or even 30 years as the tech matures. That puts it on par with wind and solar, at least on paper. But one big question mark is how well the buoys' seals will hold up. These seals are crucial, keeping sensitive internal systems dry as the buoy moves up and down along its shaft. As you can imagine, that doesn't exactly scream low maintenance or eco-friendly. Leaking hydraulic fluids or debris from damaged WECs are an environmental concern, but there's more. Underwater noise, both from installation and operation, can disrupt marine life, stress animals, drive away fish, dolphins, and whales, or interfere with our communications. That said, CorePower is doing things a bit differently. Unlike offshore wind turbines, which are typically anchored with steel piles hammered into the seabed, CorePower's UMAC anchor is vibrated into place, a process that's 15 to 20 decibels quieter. As for day-to-day noise, CorePower did measure ambient underwater sound levels at the Portuguese site before deployment, but we're still waiting on data showing how the buoys may have changed the underwater soundscape. That kind of monitoring will be key to understanding the full acoustic footprint of future wave farms. There's still a lot we don't know about how dense wave farms might affect marine ecosystems. On the plus side, by soaking up wave energy, WECs could reduce storm surge and help protect coastlines. On the flip side, they might alter sediment flows or affect water quality. The devices themselves, along with their anchors and cables, can act like artificial reefs, creating new habitat for marine life, but they can also attract invasive species. Another big unknown? Electromagnetic fields from underwater power cables. Some species like sharks, rays, and sea turtles can sense these fields, and we still don't fully understand how that might affect their behavior. Even bottom-dwelling creatures near the cables could experience changes in development or growth. That's why the first wave farms will need serious environmental monitoring, not just good vibes, but real data, before we go all in on scaling up. In some ways, it's still a wait and see, but we might not have to wait too long. Just 4 kilometers, or about 2.5 miles, off the coast of County Clare in western Ireland, CorePower plans to deploy its first 5-megawatt wave array in 2026, scaling up to 30 megawatts by 2028, alongside a floating offshore wind farm. The project is backed by public-private partnerships between Ireland's Utility ESB and Blue Economy developer Simply Blue, with up to €39.5 million in co-funding from the EU Innovation Fund. Once online, the array is expected to generate 15 gigawatt-hours per year, or enough to power 4,200 homes and avoid 27,000 tons of CO2 emissions over its first 10 years. That 30 megawatt Irish project is a big step, but it's just the beginning. An independently verified cost model suggests that CorePower's levelized cost of energy, or LCOE, could eventually match solar and onshore wind, falling between $32 and $43 per megawatt hour. But the catch? We won't see that price until wave energy scales up to around 20 gigawatts of capacity, that's about 67,000 buoys, assuming each one stays at 300 kilowatts. But the cost curve starts bending earlier. After just 2,000 buoys or 600 megawatts, the LCOE is expected to drop below $76 per megawatt hour, landing on par with offshore wind. That milestone could be hit as soon as 2035. And because wave power kicks in when wind and solar dip, the real system cost might end up even cheaper than that. So how is it getting so cheap so fast? Well, CorePower says it's prioritized LCOE from day one of its design process. Rather than using a typical heavy steel hull, which is costly, corrosion prone, and tied to unpredictable metal prices, the company opted for a composite fiberglass and resin structure. It's the same kind of material used in speedboat hulls and wind turbine blades. Strong, lightweight, and cheaper to manufacture and scale. As CorePower's former managing director Miguel Silva explained to Inlet in April of 2024, we moved to a high efficiency, mostly fully automated process to manufacture from resin and fiberglass. So this immediately gave us a 70% reduction on LCOE. That said, wind power has taken heat for its fiberglass turbine blades, which are notoriously difficult to recycle. But a new resin might be changing that, which we covered in a past episode, which I'll link to in the description. CorePower's next power move? Mobile factories. The company plans to build a drivetrain in Sweden, but the buoys themselves are on site, wherever the site happens to be. When the job's done, the whole buoy making setup packs up and moves on like a clean energy traveling circus. It's a big deal when your devices are nearly 30 feet wide and 60 feet tall. Hollow, but huge. Building on location keeps transport costs down, trims the carbon footprint, and helps keep the rollout ... rolling. And that matters because the fastest way to lower wave energy's LCOE is to build as many devices as possible, as quickly as possible. Just like solar and wind, wave power needs economies of scale and a whole lot of learning by doing. It also needs public research funding and financial incentives, the same boost wind and solar got to reach escape velocity. The International Energy Agency crunched the numbers. Getting wave energy to market price by the mid-2040s could require $74 billion in public subsidies, if we invest early in R&D. But if we underfund the early stages, we could end up spending more than twice as much waiting for the tech to catch up. The good news? It doesn't take a tidal wave of cash. The IEA estimates that if just 20 countries chip in $11 million a year now and $7 million after 2030, we could ride the cost curve all the way to parity. Europe's already waxing its board. Between 2007 and 2019, European nations invested around $530 million into wave and tidal projects. CorePower Ocean alone raised $34 million in venture capital in late 2024. It then secured another $18 million from the European Innovation Council Accelerator in early 2025, bringing its total funding to over $100 million. With nearly half of the world's wave energy patents and 10 grid-connected test sites, Europe is pulling ahead. The U.S. is peddling hard to catch up though. Since 2019, it's approved $520 million in ocean energy funding. Oregon's test site is expected to go live soon, and California has passed a bill requiring the state to identify sites for future wave farms. But recently, federal clean energy funding was blocked before a court ruling got things flowing again. And with offshore wind permitting still paused, it's fair to ask, is the tide of U.S. support for ocean energy coming in? Or going out? Then there's Australia. With the mighty southern ocean at its doorstep and the largest wave energy resource on Earth, it's somehow still just watching from the shore. Less than 2% of the $1.5 billion invested by its Renewable Energy Agency has gone to wave power, though the Blue Economy Cooperative Research Center is hoping to coax the government into finally wading in. With public and private funding finally starting to flow, companies like CorePower Ocean are moving beyond prototypes and into real-world projects. But what do you think? After decades of false starts, is wave power finally ready to deliver? Jump into the comments and let me know. And be sure to listen to my follow-up podcast, Still to Be Determined, where we'll keep this conversation going. Thanks as always to my patrons for your continued support and helping to keep the channel going. Keep your mind open, stay curious, and I'll see you in the next one.