Limitless wave power could cure our addiction to fossil fuels

Waves could one day provide up to half of all our energy needsGETTY / CHARLES MCQUILLAN / STRINGER

 
For all their faults, there is an advantage to pulling things out of the ground and burning them that has kept fossil fuels on top of the global energy market. Come rain or shine, fossil fuels do burn. Coal burns even when it’s cloudy. Oil burns on a still day.
In the renewable energy debate, tradition, infrastructure and price all play second fiddle to that inconvenient truth: come rain, night or ecological apocalypse: things always burn.
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Inna Braverman, co-founder of Eco Wave Power, is proposing an alternative answer to the renewable reliability problem. Fix a system of buoys (or ‘floaters’) and generators to existing marine structures – breakwaters, jetties and parts of disused wartime ports – rather than tethering multi-million dollar edifices to the ocean floor.
Not only does this take the modular wave-powered generators out of the way of most underwater creatures, it also means they never stop running. For as long as they can be dredged up, fossil fuels will always burn. But the world isn’t running out of waves.

Eco Wave Power co-founder Inna BravermanMICHAEL FISCH
 

“Wave energy is one of the [most] significant natural resources that our planet has,” Braverman says. “It doesn’t shut down at night or if there’s cloud cover, like solar; or if there’s pollution like in China which blocks the sun. With wave energy you have some quiet days and some stormy days, but you still have a higher average availability of the resource and higher production.”
The concept of wave energy is nothing new. Energy giants explored the ocean as the ‘next big thing’ decades ago. But the logic of oil, gas and coal prospectors – go to the place with the most of it, then dig it out – doesn’t work in oceans with waves high enough to potentially topple an aircraft carrier.
In the past, companies have struggled to commercialise wave energy, Braverman says. “99 per cent of the competitors in the wave energy market decided to go offshore. Offshore means four or five kilometres into the sea, which means the technology needs to be moored to the ocean floor, which is very expensive. You need ships and divers for installation and maintenance, there’s no way to avoid storms because - again - it’s connected to the ocean floor.
“That made the big energy companies scared. Ten or fifteen years ago, big companies did invest in offshore wave energy technology, and the result in terms of investment was not so good. First of all, the prices were very high: prices of very small devices reached about $100-150 million [and] could provide electricity for 20-100 households - which was crazy,” Braverman says

In some Chinese cities, thick smog makes it impossible for solar panels to work properlyGETTY / VCG / CONTRIBUTOR
 

Then there was the problem of liability. When storms brought high waves – sometimes as high as 20 metres – they also threatened to destroy energy-harvesting equipment and send the energy companies’ profits spiraling down the drain. “No insurance company would insure such technology... It’s in the middle of nowhere; it’s just some coordinates on a map. It scared them,” says Braverman.
In 2011, Eco Wave Power had that legacy of negative connotations to scrub off. Wave power was expensive, inefficient and vulnerable to breakdown. Braverman’s modular system of buoys had to be demonstrably the opposite. And so they are: without the need for expensive maintenance, after installation they can be largely left alone, quietly feeding energy into the electrical grid while bobbing up and down unobtrusively out of sight in some forgotten cove. And should dangerously blustery weather roll in, the buoys can either be submerged or lifted out of the water altogether, ready to be redeployed when things calm down.
“Everybody was terribly afraid that it was going to break,” she says.So Braverman opted to stay close to the shore and build mostly on existing structures such as man-made breakwaters. “Then we can lift the floaters or submerge them underwater during a storm, so there’s no harm caused.”

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Braverman chose to put the majority of her system on land – like a power station – so the only parts in the water are the floaters and their hydraulic cylinders. “And by lowering the prices and raising the reliability, we were able to get insurance,” she says.
And after a grand reveal in Gibraltar, where a fully functional system and proof-of-concept bobs away straddling a World War II ammunition jetty, Braverman’s team is turning its eyes to large-scale, global deployment. Its next targets? China, then the world.
“In China, they wanted our system because they have 18,000 kilometres of coastline and more than 6,500 islands,” she says. But it’s difficult to give an potential market share for the whole world, because the available of wave energy varies from country to country. “Some countries have much more sun but don’t have any waves, and some countries have wind but don’t have sun… It’s a combination. In Chile, for example, or in Scotland or Australia - countries which are very open to the sea - they could [get] 80 or 90 per cent of their energy from wave energy.”
But if pressed on how much of tomorrow’s energy wave might account for, Braverman’s answer blows competitors out of the water. Eventually, wave power could provide up to 50 per cent of what humanity consumes, she says. Unlike fossil fuels, there’s no time limit on us harvesting wave energy, but as the world tumbles down the slope of of irreversible climate change, the wave-powered future really can’t come quickly enough.