Australia Pilots Novel Wave Energy Converter

By Haley Zaremba - Apr 10, 2025

• Ocean waves possess enough energy to meet global energy needs multiple times over, offering a massive potential source of clean, baseload power.
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• Recent scientific research explores the interaction of underwater and surface waves to create enhanced waves, significantly increasing energy output and efficiency.
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• Practical advancements, such as a novel wave energy converter being piloted in Australia, demonstrate promising steps towards commercially viable and consistent wave power generation.

Harnessing the power of our oceans could provide all the energy that the world needs three times over, with zero carbon emissions. Ocean waves produce an estimated 50 trillion to 80 trillion watts of power on a global scale. Even if we are able to harness just a fraction of that clean baseload power, it would upend global energy systems as we know them. 

The issue is finding an efficient and cost-effective way to harness that energy and bring it to a commercially viable scale. “Many devices have been designed to capture and convert waves’ great power into electricity, but today’s technologies face challenges in efficiency, particularly in deeper waters,” The Conversation recently reported. “As a result, wave energy hasn’t yet taken off as a renewable source in the same way as wind and solar.”

But scientists haven’t given up on finding a technological solution to this puzzle, and we’re getting closer all the time. A new study from scientists at Cambridge University investigates how different kinds of waves can be harnessed to create more powerful forms of power production through ‘enhanced waves’. The study, published earlier this month in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, shows that deep underwater waves can interact with surface waves to create more energy and increase surface wave height by more than 30%, opening a door for more finely tuned and efficient ways to capture wave energy. This represents a key breakthrough in how we understand waves and their energy, as “the interaction between acoustic and surface gravity waves is generally neglected in classical water-wave theory due to their distinct propagation speeds.” 

“Enhanced waves would enable today’s wave turbines and oscillating water columns (which use wave power to force air through a turbine) to produce more electricity, effectively overcoming their efficiency problem,” one of the paper’s authors wrote for The Conversation. 

While this ‘enhanced wave’ research remains highly theoretical, with lab trials forthcoming, there are more concrete advances being made in engineering the mechanisms that harvest wave power. In Australia, a team of researchers is currently piloting a novel ‘Moored Multi-Mode Multibody’ (M4) wave-energy converter to see if it, too, can break barriers for efficient wave power production. The design features hinged floats that rotate frames to drive generators, creating electricity from the natural motion of the ocean off of the country’s south-western coast.

Critically, if successful, this model would offer a way to tap into baseload clean power production, meaning that the generation would be more or less consistent. This would give it a huge leg up over wind and solar power, which are variable and depend on the weather and the seasons. The team behind the Australian M4 model emphasizes this potential breakthrough. “Waves reaching Albany have travelled uninterrupted for thousands of kilometres across the Southern Ocean,” MERA manager Wiebke Ebeling was recently quoted by Nature. “They’re energy-dense, highly consistent, and show little seasonal variability.”

Together, these theoretical and practical breakthroughs are ushering in a new era for wave energy. The potential impact of scalable and commercially viable wave energy would be hard to overstate, and could prove transformative in contexts around the globe. 

In the United States alone, “the theoretical annual energy potential of waves off the coasts [...] was estimated to be as much as 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours, which is equal to about 63% of total U.S. utility-scale electricity generation,” according to a 2023 report from the United States Energy Information Administration. Other potential hotspots for wave energy generation include the coastal regions of Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In Europe, the potential of wave power production is estimated at a whopping 2,800 TWh per year. That’s about 107.6% of the world’s current levels of nuclear power production.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com