“It’s very expensive right now, and really hard to do. Working out in the water is very complex, in some cases in the harshest places on Earth. … Then being able to build something that can last 20 to 30 years. We’ve made progress, but we’re a decade away,” Ramsey said.
State Sen. Steve Padilla, a Democrat from Chula Vista and the author of the wave energy bill, said ocean power has “great potential” but it has been agonizingly slow.
“Folks have been busy focusing on other things,” he said, citing the state’s current push for floating offshore wind development. “There has been a combination of a lack of knowledge and awareness of the infrastructure and impacts. We know the state’s energy portfolio has to be as broad as possible.”
A spokesperson for the California Energy Commission, which is taking the lead on the new state study, declined to comment about wave power, saying its work has not yet begun.
The potential is enticing: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (PDF) estimated that the total wave and tide energy resources that are available in the U.S. with current technology are equivalent to 57% of 2019’s domestic energy production. While the report noted that the technologies are in the early stages of development, “even if only a small portion of the technical resource potential is captured, marine energy technologies would make significant contributions to our nation’s energy needs.”
The U.S. Department of Energy’s “Powering the Blue Economy (PDF)” initiative, among others, provides grants and sponsors competitions to explore new and better technology. The fiscal year 2023 federal budget for ocean waves energy is $123 million, Ramsey said.
One program is funding research led by national labs, including designs to improve wave-driven turbines and building better motor drives for wave-energy converters.
Motion in the ocean
The idea of harnessing wave power has been kicking around California for decades. So has the state policy of ordering research into its potential: A 2008 study (PDF) prepared for the Energy Commission and the Ocean Protection Council concluded that much more research was needed to better assess the potential impacts of wave and tidal energy.
At the time that study was released, one of the technology’s most ardent proponents was a young politician named Gavin Newsom. While mayor of San Francisco in 2007, Newsom proposed a tidal energy project near the Golden Gate Bridge. That idea was scrapped because it was prohibitively expensive.