Small Islands May Introduce the World to Ocean Energy

Small islands are experiencing Climate Change in real time. While rising seas and temperatures threaten only parts of many larger countries, they threaten the whole of a small island—its population, its economy, in some cases even its very existence. For many small islands—including many Small Island Developing States (SIDS)—ocean energy may be their best option for switching to renewable energy. A lot of small islands don’t have enough landmass to support large wind or solar installations, but they are surrounded by ocean that can provide blue power all day, all year round.

 At COP26, many wealthier nations pledged to help less wealthy nations with their energy transition. An alliance was forged between International Renewable Energy Association and the Alliance of Small Island States to accelerate that transition. The traditional approaches of deploying mature technologies such as solar and wind, however, won’t work the same on many small islands as they do in places with more landmass. Besides the scarcity of land, many islands are protective of tourists’ ocean views—which have great economic value—and could be marred by offshore installations. These are challenges that some wave and tidal technologies can overcome.

Technologies that are mostly below the surface don’t mar ocean views and may require very little land. For example, Seabased, which provides blue power from wave energy, requires only enough land for the size of a small hut. Plus ocean power is formidable. Waves are 800 times denser than wind, so they pack hundreds of times the power. And waves work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so they’re easy to integrate on the grid.

Small islands may play a key role in the green transition

For some places, wading into the less tested waters of ocean energy may seem risky; for small islands, though, it’s an approach that means safety. One thing all islands have in abundance is ocean. Many of these islands have excellent wave energy resources and many also have tidal and ocean thermal resources. SIDS including Barbados, St. Lucia, Tonga, Trinidad, and Capo Verde, for example, have the kind of wave climate that could make wave energy a substantial contributor to the baseload. Though other factors must be explored to know whether they are good candidates for wave energy, if it turns out that wave energy is an option these islands would be turning to a resource that will never be depleted and is, in many places, highly stable. That means safety for their lives and economies for decades to come.

The SIDS are recognizing that their future is in their hands. The island of Barbados, for example, has recently invested $60 million in renewable energy projects and has committed another $90 million for the next several years.

Bermuda, another small island, may go down in history as a leader who brought the third vertical in renewables—ocean energy—to the rest of the world. Bermuda just announced that it is moving forward on what is likely to be the world’s first wave energy park. Bermuda’s Minister of Home Affairs Hon. Walter Roban, MP, JP said “We have the opportunity to show that we are serious about this transition…. We are making a sincere effort, as a small island jurisdiction, to adapt.”

Every island Has a HOME-hybrid optimal mix of energy

Renewable energy isn’t one size fits all, and it doesn’t need to be. Every place in the world has a unique mix of natural resources—sun, wind, wave, tide, ocean thermal power—that could provide various amounts of clean energy. We call this HOME, Hybrid Optimal Mix of Energy. All available sources can be used together, just as nature does. The point is to have the technologies in place to convert that power of nature into electricity for people, without further harming the Earth. Wind and solar energy have transformed the world’s idea of power, but after decades of development, they only bring about 10% of the power on the world’s grids. They can produce a lot of power when they are producing, but they also stop, leaving grids scrambling for expensive batteries or fossil fuels.

The ocean, however, covers 70% of the surface of the earth and waves never stop. Together with wind and sun, they can produce a substantial baseload.

None of the small islands or SIDS can, alone, change the trajectory of Climate Change. They alone can’t stop the seas from rising or prevent the catastrophic weather changes wrought by changing global temperatures. By embracing ocean energy, however, they can help the rest of the world see how potent, reliable, and essential electricity from the power of the seas is. Hopefully, that will make it clear it’s time to back ocean energy around the world.

Climate Change Requires we change overnight; COVID showed us we can

Anyone who says the world can’t transform overnight to fight Climate Change hasn’t been paying attention. For the last 18 months, during the COVID-19 lockdown, the world changed overnight, because it had to. Companies that had been ducking necessary investments because of cost and operational disruption—investments in things like Digital Transformation and providing remote work--suddenly found their objections obliterated by COVID. Workers learned that not only could they do their jobs at home, but now many employees around the world say they don’t want to go back to the office full time. It was a sea change, and nature was in charge. The comparison to the COP26 dialogue about the Green Transition is clear: today, the fossil industry’s narrative is that a fast shift to renewables is impossible (never mind that they’ve been saying that for 50 years). But as history has proven again and again, nothing converts the impossible to the possible as efficiently as having no other choice.

 Do As Nature Does: Diversify

The argument goes that wind and solar probably can’t get us to 100% CO2-free electrical power on their own. That’s true. The sun goes down; the wind stops; and battery technology can’t fill in all the gaps. However, wind and solar don’t have to do it on their own. The ocean is an abundant source of power, covering 70% of Earth’s surface. There are waves, tides, ocean thermal conversion power, all of which can be enlisted to effect the transition.

Humans often look for single, silver bullet solutions to complex problems: monoculture farming is an example. It’s designed to simplify agriculture and increase profits, but it’s hard on the soil and creates fragility—if a disease specific to that crop strikes, a food crisis can ensue. Nature, though, engenders resiliency through diversity, ecosystems, and networks. Interdependence and balance enabled Earth to recover from, and survive, global catastrophes. We can adopt this model, creating a harmonious blend of several natural resources to increase our resilience and get us past the roadblocks hindering the Green Transition.

Wave energy is stable and predictable. The amount of power that grid operators can expect to glean from a wave park can be predicted from 5-to-14 days ahead of the time it is needed. In many densely populated places, moderate waves can provide a baseload at a price lower than the community currently pays. In most of these places, wave power parks can be paired with sun and/or wind. This provides an even larger renewable energy baseload and, in balancing the contribution of each resource, increases the value of both technologies to grid operators and to the market.  

In other wave climates, a tidal energy facility, or ocean thermal energy conversion might serve more effectively. It just depends on nature’s resources in that part of the world. The focus isn’t on one company or one technology—it’s on finally learning from nature and working with diverse resources to create power without destroying the species you’re creating that power for.

 Ocean Energy Tipping Point

After decades of development, several ocean energy companies are very close to commercialization. With support—in policies, subsidies, and investment—they could cross the last mile where research and development becomes commercial deployment of ocean energy. This is often the place where support is needed most. With investment and incentives, ocean energy companies such as Seabased could be producing clean electrical power in a year or two, exponentially hastening the Green Transition. Wave energy alone could theoretically produce more than 100% of the world’s current electrical consumption.

At present, we still have time to make this change without the fearsome repercussions that scientists warn are coming. We don’t know how much time. As COVID showed us, when Nature decides to change things, things change. Hopefully this time we’ll change first.

Making Wave Energy Affordable

Wave energy should be among the topics at the COP26 United Nations Climate Change conference. Wave energy is abundant around the world and could theoretically provide more than 100% of the world’s current electrical consumption, with no CO2. Driven by the promise of this resource, engineers and scientists have worked for decades to create technology that could convert the dense power of ocean waves into electricity. But for that technology to be deployed on the world’s shores, they had to make wave energy affordable, competitive with current energy sources. Companies like Seabased have had to bring down the cost of wave energy.

“For wave energy to be a viable alternative to fossil fuels it can’t just be clean, it can’t just be good for the environment, it also has to be cost-competitive with the energy that is being produced now,” said Seabased CEO Laurent Albert. “Those constraints have long been part of our design process and our market identification and continue to help guide us as we approach commercialization. In some of our markets, the electricity produced by our technology will actually be cheaper than the power currently being used.”

Islands are an obvious example. Thousands of islands around the world can’t function without expensive, polluting, imported diesel fuel. For the islands where the wave resource is right, wave energy could provide electricity from a renewable fuel source that costs nothing, is CO2-free, and is locally produced, offering energy security and clean air along with savings.

The goal, as Albert says, is to always keep in mind Seabased’s data-driven sweet spot at the confluence of performance, environmental safety, community benefit, and cost savings. For example:

Picking the best location for a wave energy park:

The farther into the ocean one goes, the more powerful the waves. So Seabased didn’t want to be onshore, where the waves are weaker. However, the farther one goes offshore to install equipment, the greater the cost. Seabased generators are designed to rest on the seabed, safe from the rougher waves at the surface that could shorten their lifespan (thus driving up costs). So our optimal locations can best be described as near-shore, at water depths of 20-50 meters.

• In our locations, the technology can rest safely on the seabed with only the rugged steel buoy on the surface.

• Installation and maintenance are much less costly where our generators are located than they would be if the generators had to be installed in deep water.

• Sea cable is costly; having to deliver power a long way via sea cable increases the price of the electricity.

Wave Park Installation

Seabased’s design always called for the generators to rest on an unprepared seabed that didn’t involve drilling or any other disruption of the environment.  Drilling damages the ecosystem and costs a fortune. Offshore drilling rigs cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, Seabased anchors wave energy converters using heavy concrete bases that can be built with small holes on the sides that some sea life prefer to the otherwise barren ocean floor. This can increase biodiversity. The bases can also be built onsite, providing local labor. And if the park is ever decommissioned, removing the WECS is as simple as lifting them out of the ocean, leaving little trace that they were ever there.

Off-the-shelf parts for wave energy components

Seabased’s technology is protected by nearly 400 patents, yet the design—created and refined by scientists, and engineers--uses many component parts anyone could order online. One example is the company’s use of ferrite magnets, a kind of magnet that could be picked up at a hardware store. Seabased experimented with several magnets and discovered that, while pricier magnets can produce more power under some circumstances, they would drive up the cost of the wave energy beyond the extra boost of power.  The pricier magnets also put the supply chain at risk and depend on mining practices that have come under serious scrutiny for their mistreatment of labor.

Standardized shipping of wave energy components

Anyone who has seen a 75-plus-meter wind turbine blade being transported knows what an impressive sight that is. Transporting these monolithic turbines and towers has presented a lot of challenges to the wind energy industry. Seabased has learned that sometimes small is better. The company wanted to save fuel, and reduce wave energy’s cost, by being able to ship components and completed generators on regular cargo vessels. Other component parts, such as the concrete bases and buoys, are ideally built onsite which also saves fuel and shipping costs and creates local jobs.

Recycling of wave energy components

In the current design, Seabased manufactures buoys of recycled steel and will use and recycle other materials as possible. Recycling steel saves on carbon emissions and reduces the need for mining.

Seabased is in the process of evaluating and honing its lifecycle CO2 footprint. Early numbers are promising when calculating the impact of the measures the company has taken. Making wave energy that’s gentle on the environment and affordable for the people is essential to bringing this powerful resource into the renewable energy mix. And bringing stable, predictable wave energy into the renewable mix can significantly increase the percentage of renewables on the grid which is a key step to combatting climate change.

Wave energy could be the answer for the coming energy crisis

As the global economy rebounds from COVID-19 more quickly than expected, and extreme temperatures tax fuel reserves, the world is heading into a new global energy crisis. The last time we faced a crisis like this, in the 1970s, countries scrambled to make wind and solar energy a reality, and launched both industries. This time, wave energy is ready to meet the crisis. Resourcing wave energy, at this stage when companies like Seabased are already close to commercialization, would not only be a real solution for the problem today, but would powerfully combat the issue of rising CO2 emissions and global temperatures from here on. Conversely, investing in fossil fuel production as a solution would be like throwing fuel oil on a burning planet.

On October 6, addressing the European Parliament, Energy Commissioner Kadri Simpson noted that wind and solar—those industries the world supported and encouraged in the last energy crisis-- are not exposed to the price volatility of fossil fuels and generate the cheapest electricity in Europe:

“We have to be clear. The current price hike has little to do with our climate policies and much to do with our dependence on imported fossil fuels and their volatile prices,” she said. “The Green Deal provides the only lasting solution to Europe’s energy challenge: more renewables and improved energy efficiency.… The best response to the price challenge is to progress faster towards our target goal of 65% of renewable electricity by 2030.”

Time for wave to enter the renewable energy market

Wind and solar have transformed the energy landscape; but they can’t do it alone. After decades of development and deployment, they still provide only 10% of the power on the grid. They are simply too intermittent to generate the baseload of power grid operators need to meet demand. Electricity from ocean wave energy could provide more than 100% of the world’s current electric demand. Waves work 24/7, 365 days a year. Grid operators can predict, from 5-14 days in advance, how much wave power they can add to their baseload, and plan accordingly. Waves don’t have to be huge to produce meaningful amounts of power, either. Seabased, for example, has optimized its system to work best with 1-3 meters waves.

Despite the numerous benefits of wave, though, bringing wave energy to the market has taken longer than wind and sun took, and not just because the latter had more government support. The very advantages that wave energy has can make building a wave energy park very difficult. Building a technology that will survive in constantly moving saltwater—a substance 800 times denser than air—presents a daunting engineering challenge. Ocean testing costs considerably more than testing on land. Yet while journals and “experts” determined that these concerns made wave energy too difficult, too expensive, or too futuristic, to consider as a solution to the world’s energy and climate problems, companies like Seabased have been plugging away, solving the problems one at a time.

We’re currently optimizing our system that was designed from hundreds of patents as we figured out:

•  How to make wave energy work in the moderate waves that are most common in populated areas.

• How to turn inputs from many different waves happening at different seconds into a single stream of grid-ready electricity.

• How to protect our technology from the turbulent ocean environment by resting it safe on the ocean floor.

• How to both make significant amounts of clean electricity and protect the environment, even increase biodiversity.

• How to keep the costs low so wave energy can compete, in many markets, against currently used fuel sources.

The ocean wave energy industry has been tackling the obstacles to commercializing wave power with relatively little financial or policy support compared to wind and solar. Seabased and a few other companies whose technologies may work best in different environments, are now only months away from commercialization and making wave energy a viable source of electricity around the globe.

Wave power is an endless source of clean electricity

Ocean waves are a ubiquitous, endlessly renewable power source. The oceans cover 70% of the surface of the planet and most of the largest cities around the globe are coastal. We can map the wave resource to know where our technology will provide the best solution. It’s time to help push this emerging technology into the world. Wave energy can help solve the current and growing global energy crisis. It can also provide energy security and economic benefit to economically depressed areas that are currently completely dependent on expensive and polluting imported fossil fuels and are at greatest risk from the coming crisis.

This is wave power’s moment.

As Kadri Simpson told the EU: “Ultimately, the solution is the same, whether it’s about prices, security of supply or climate: scaling up local, affordable, renewable energy is the way forward.”

Wave energy can fuel desalination

Drinkable water is essential to life; yet in some places, is dangerously scarce. As climate change advances, the problem is only expected to grow worse. Converting ocean water to fresh water through desalination could provide abundant drinking water. The reverse osmosis process used to remove the salt from ocean water, however, consumes enormous amounts of energy. This can be both financially and environmentally costly, since fossil fuels are often used. Wave energy can fuel reverse osmosis in a way that’s both clean and affordable.  

Around the world, more than 20,000 desalination plants provide water for more than 300 million people  every day. Some of this is in inland desert areas but much of it is along coastlines and on islands. Desalination also has been explored as a source for drinking water in disaster areas where floods or other disasters render the area’s water system unusable.  

How reverse osmosis desalination works 

In osmosis, a solvent of lower concentration moves through a membrane into a solvent of higher concentration until the concentration of both is about equal. So fresh water would move into salt water until they were both equally salty.  

In reverse osmosis, it goes the other way. Salt water is forced into fresh water. The sea water must be pumped into the system and forced through many filters to remove progressively smaller particles until it gets to the membrane that keeps the salt on one side while the fresh water travels through to the other. That explains the need for so much energy to arrive at newly desalinated water. 

Why wave energy is ideal for desalination 

Seabased wave energy power technology is an ideal power source for a desalination plant. Wave energy is an abundant, reliable, predictable source of power and it’s already in the ocean. A wave energy park could be built as a dedicated source for a desalination plant. Desalination can also be fueled by a wave power park that provides grid-ready electricity in which the desalination plant is operated as a side benefit, an offtake.

When a wave power park is connected to a grid system, the grid typically only uses some of the energy converted from the waves, getting some of its power from other sources. The wave power that is not used to create a baseload of renewable power for the grid could easily be channeled into fueling a reverse osmosis desalination plant. And since it comes from CO2-free, renewable, reliable wave power, the electricity produced would be gentle on the environment. In fact, Seabased wave energy power parks can become artificial reefs. 

Water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface and 80% of the world’s largest cities are on the coasts. So wave energy could fuel desalination plants in many coastal population centers and islands. Seabased’s wave power plants are designed to work in moderate wave climates, so huge waves are not required. In many markets, the price of fueling desalination with wave could be significantly lower than fossil fuels.

Desalinating sea water in a way that’s both affordable and environmentally sound, in conjunction with conservation, is going to be essential to ensuring that drinkable water is available. Wave energy is one great way to make that happen.  

Wave energy can accelerate the renewable transition

If the journey from fossil fuel energy to carbon-free renewable sources like sun and wind was a trip from London to New York, we’d only have made it as far as Limerick, Ireland. After decades of subsidies and development, only 10% of the power on the world’s grids comes from variable renewable energy (VRE) sources such as sun and wind, compared to more than 60% from fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas. (The other 30% is nuclear and dispatchables like biofuel and hydro.) Countries like Denmark and South Australia have nearly 50% VRE on the grid. But they’re the exception.

To meet our renewables targets, we’ve got the whole Atlantic ocean to cross.

The journey to carbon-free variable renewable energy

A big reason we’ve not gotten further with the green transition is intermittency.

Sun and wind can produce a lot of power at some points and completely stop at others. That doesn’t work well for grid operators who must always be able to provide a baseload of power—enough electricity to meet normal demand. That’s why they hang on to the power sources they know will be there: coal, oil, and gas; power sources they can dispatch on demand. Many add VRE when they can afford to, but so far it’s not a lot. Government subsidies have encouraged grid operators and utility companies to make room for sun and wind, which has made their development possible. In some parts of the world, these subsidies are now set to expire.

Getting to Net 0 by 2050

Scientists and engineers around the world are working to solve the problem by, among other things:

• Using battery storage to capture the power created by sun and wind and release it over time.

• Improving the grid so it can handle the intermittency better.

• Using dispatchables like biofuel and hydrogen (so named because you can “dispatch” them as you need, unlike solar and wind).

Every one of these options is being implemented, but they all have complications. For example, battery storage is often seen as the obvious solution. But it faces a multitude of problems. One of these is that battery technology today is almost entirely focused on lithium-ion batteries that utilize Cobalt, a metal mostly found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is infamous for human rights violations. Cobalt is often mined by children as young as seven. Cobalt can also be mined or collected from the seabed by drilling or pulling up the top layer from the sea floor. Research shows that such actions have profound environmental impacts; and the oceans are already in trouble. Alternatives to Cobalt are under research but none has replaced the industry standard yet.

Nearly every technology humans use to generate power has some environmental and/or social impact. The goal needs to be to create the most power with as little negative impact on the Earth as possible.

Wave energy can be a big piece of that solution.

Wave energy is a core piece of the puzzle

Wave energy is relatively stable, operating 24/7, 365 days a year. Wave power could, theoretically, produce more than 100% of the current electrical consumption. The ocean covers 70% of the earth’s surface, is available to large populations, and is highly reliable and predictable. Grid operators can know from 5-to-14 days in advance how much wave energy they will have to contribute to the baseload. By combining the reliability of wave with solar and wind, grid operators can substantially boost the amount of VREs on the grid without risking interruptions.

Wave energy has been advancing toward commercialization, despite not having the broad public support that enabled wind and solar to become established. Yet its viability does not yet seem to be understood. One study published in March 2021, for example, confirmed the value of wave energy to increase the amount of VREs on the grid, but seemed to rely on old data about whether wave energy companies could provide a kind of electricity that can be integrated into the grid. (One cited reference was from 2010; 11 years is a long time in the technology world.) Currently Seabased is in the process of fine-tuning our electrical system which does, in fact, convert the energy from many generators, channeling many waves, into a uniform stream of electricity calibrated for the grid.

Creating a new energy industry is expensive. Doing so when the equipment must be installed and tested in the ocean presents many difficulties not faced by those installing energy plants on land. The resulting carbon-free power will be more than worth the effort, but wave energy needs the kind of support in terms of incentives and subsidies solar and wind had to get us closer to Net 0. This fact was officially recognized in December 2020 when the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) signed a memorandum of understanding with Ocean Energy Europe(OEE) to partner in the push for regulation and incentives that would support ocean energy. Francesco de la Camera, IRENA’s Director General said in a statement:

“Renewable energy from oceans has the potential to meet four times the global electricity demand of today, foster a blue economy, and bring socio-economic benefits to some of the most vulnerable areas to climate change such as Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and coastal areas. Close cooperation with OEE in platforms like IRENA’s Collaborative Framework and Coalition for Action is absolutely vital to share knowledge with industry to ensure a widespread deployment of ocean and offshore renewables in the future.”

 Seabased’s solution

Seabased’s technology is easy to scale is optimized for medium waves of only 1-to-3 meters. In addition to being capable of providing ample power in many markets, Seabased has designed its technology to be gentle on the environment. We do not drill into the seabed or disrupt it, we just place our generators on the seabed with gravity bases. There are no moving parts that pose a risk to sea life; no toxins or emissions. Our power parks have even been shown to become artificial reefs in some environments, increasing biodiversity.  

Around the world, countries are recognizing it’s time to accelerate the energy transition. Wave energy, an abundant and perpetual resource around the world, could be a powerful catalyst.

International Renewable Energy Association: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-share-of-electricity-generation-2019