The energy wave drive It has a great advantage over other more popular renewable energy sources, such as the sun or wind: it never rests. Waves are an almost continuous and enormously energetic resource. And yet, it is the ugly duckling of green energies because its unpredictable and far from constant nature turns energy extraction into a titanic task in terms of efficiency.
An American startup, Panthalassa, has been testing for a while In Pacific waters, a prototype that rethinks from the ground up how to relate to the ocean: instead of resisting it, it follows the flow.
The invention. He Ocean-2 It is a device that at first glance looks like a giant buoy. In fact, in tests in Puget Sound, Washington, several people reported an unidentified floating object. The spherical part of the end (the node) has almost 10 meters in diameter and is mounted on a tubular hull approximately 60 meters long (which is submerged under the sea). But the analogy with the buoy is accurate in that it is a simple structure that sways with the waves. When it is horizontal it moves and when it is vertical (when it looks like a buoy) it starts working.
Why it is important. Because the oceans They cover 71% of the Earth and its energy has an advantage that solar and wind power lack: consistency. The ocean generates energy regardless of whether it is day or night, even if it is calm or the sky is cloudy, which makes this energy source the ideal complement to stabilize networks. The endemic problem of this technology is its low efficiency. If this prototype can be scaled, it could become an alternative and complement to clean and independent energy for coastal areas.
Context. In the midst of the race for AI and data centers, the great bottleneck of the United States is the energyso much so that they are dusting off old energy solutions as fossil power plants and resurrecting its nuclear industry. Of course, and although his role in the US, Israel and Iran war is different from Europe and so is its access to oil, the reality is that the price of a barrel being uncontrolled does not benefit them either. In that scenario, it is expanding your investment in renewables.
Wave energy has been promising and disappointing for decades. Salt, corrosion, biological growth on structures, and the brutal cost of offshore maintenance have literally and figuratively sunk dozens of projects around the world. The result: almost everything has remained in the pilot phase. Nor has efficiency ever been anything to write home about. And while wave power has stagnated, the price of solar and wind has fallen so rapidly that it has left other clean energies without a competitive advantage. However, wave energy faces another opportunity: Ocean Energy Europe figure The portfolio of planned deployments until 2030 is at 165 MW and the United States has invested $591 million in ocean energy in the last five years.
How much energy it produces and uses. In the test he managed to generate up to 50 kW in decent wave conditions, enough to power a small coastal town. However, its priority application is not the domestic electrical network, but something more specific such as clean fuels and computing: producing green hydrogen that is transported to shore in autonomous ships, and powering data centers in the ocean.
How they do it. The design of the Ocean-2 has a more philosophical than technical point: it is not so much about resisting the ocean but about accompanying it. As the waves oscillate, water is propelled through an internal pipe to the spherical surface and then descends through turbines to generate power. It has hardly any moving partsbeyond the turbine, integrated into the steel structure
The buoy does not have nets or elements that can trap marine fauna, it operates silently and with slow movements: Panthalassa’s environmental manager, Dr. Liam Chen, explained for local TV KOMO that its soft, low-impact design allows you to “live in harmony with the ocean.” Testing in Puget Sound showed no visible alterations to the surrounding marine ecosystem. According to the co-founderGarth Sheldon-Coulson, these machines can be made for around $1,500 per kilowatt.
What comes next. As account its co-founder, have been working for about ten years: the first four or five years was only R&D, in 2021 they launched their predecessor the Ocean-1, in 2024 the Ocean-2 was released and the Ocean-3 is already in development and It is making steady progress in its financing.
Yes, but. So far, everything is testing and prototypes because the project is in the experimental phase, that is, there is not a single commercial kilowatt generated, nor a connected network, nor long-term durability data. And the sea is not exactly an easy environment: knowing how it will withstand storms and the passage of time, what maintenance will be like or simply something as basic as the transfer of energy from the device to the network is essential. Without forgetting the cost, especially given the collapse in the costs of solar or wind energy, both technologies that are already mature, consolidated and very cheap.
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Cover | Panthalassa and Matt Paul Catalano
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