This story was originally published by Canary Media.
Trapping the energy of ocean waves to generate electricity has long been an enticing but notoriously difficult endeavor. The first rule of wave power startups is that they always fail. But a plucky company called Eco Wave Power is doing its best to prove that rule wrong, and it just notched an important win in Los Angeles.
Eco Wave Power has installed a 100-kilowatt system on a concrete wharf in the Port of Los Angeles, which it officially unveiled Tuesday. Seven steel “floaters” affixed to the structure bob with the waves, building up hydraulic pressure that gets converted to electric power by machinery in shipping containers onshore.
The project isn’t sending that power to the grid just yet, CEO Inna Braverman noted in an interview. The goal of this installation is to demonstrate the technology to stakeholders and potential customers, so it’s located in an easily accessible area in the harbor where the waves aren’t that powerful.
The bigger prize would be to install far more floaters along the 8-mile breakwater that protects the Port of LA, Braverman said, adding that this length could generate 60 megawatts with her company’s proprietary technology. The benefits are alluring: Systems in wave-battered locations can produce energy about 90% of the time, Braverman said, making for a nearly round-the-clock clean power supply close to densely populated coastal cities, without taking up valuable real estate. And the floaters actually protect the coastal barriers by absorbing the force of oncoming waves.
Eco Wave Power is backing up these assertions by self-funding a 1-megawatt installation on the coast of Porto in northern Portugal, which should be up and running by September 2026.
“We’re going to show for the first time that we can generate significant energy amounts, more than solar and wind for the same footprint,” Braverman said. The 40 large-scale floaters would export power to Portugal’s grid and compete on the spot market. If all goes well, the company wants to expand the installation to 20 megawatts.
Success there could usher in a new form of renewable energy, that operates more like always-available baseload power than intermittent solar and wind, which are nonetheless the fastest-growing generation sources on the U.S. grid these days. The work in LA is laying a foundation to move quickly on American deployments when the opportunity arises.
New wave tech, new rules
This journey started back in 2022, when Braverman partnered with the nonprofit AltaSea, which renovated a century-old dockside warehouse in the Port of LA to incubate ocean-centric technologies. The property was constructed in the 1910s to hold cargo brought in from the newly built Panama Canal, said AltaSea CEO Terry Tamminen; now it hosts kelp cultivators and underwater construction innovators.
Founded in 2011, Eco Wave Power had tested its equipment at a small scale in Gibraltar for six years and was installing it in Jaffa, Israel, but wanted to bring it to American audiences. Tamminen thought the company fit the mission of AltaSea and could help California, with its 1,100 miles of coastline, close the gap in its mission to run the whole grid on clean energy by 2045.
“We’re running out of the easy stuff, he said. “Wind, solar, even geothermal are well-worn pathways — we’re never going to get to 100% if we don’t tap other sources.”
It wasn’t clear just how long it would take to navigate multiple layers of permitting for a never-before-seen aquatic power generator. The startup needed permission from the Army Corps of Engineers, which governs the navigable waterways of the United States, as well as sign-off from the Port and other local and state authorities. Securing all those approvals ended up taking about two years, after which Eco Wave Power installed and commissioned the site in just four months, Braverman said.
But she was encouraged by that timeline, since this was the first-ever U.S. installation of its kind, and even well-known technologies have struggled through longer permitting processes.
In the meantime, Tamminen, who architected California’s wildly successful Million Solar Roofs initiative for former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), pitched the state Legislature on supporting ocean power through the early stages of development. Sacramento agreed and in 2023 passed SB 605, which instructed state officials to study new incentives for nascent wave-based technologies.
“We’re trying to use California’s size as the world’s fourth-largest economy to get these blue technologies scaled up, and that makes it faster, better, cheaper for everybody,” Tamminen said.
The California Energy Commission published a study on the pros and cons of wave power in July 2024, which could lay the groundwork for more supportive policies in the future.
A different kind of wave power
If wave power can scale, it would be one of the precious few new electricity sources that have appeared on the scene since the rise of wind and solar. Next-generation nuclear designs have yet to send any power to the U.S. grid after years of effort and investment. Perhaps the closest thing to a new arrival is Fervo Energy’s advanced geothermal, which is operating in a 3.5-megawatt commercial project in Nevada.
Worldwide, ocean power ventures have failed in spectacular fashion. Harnessing Neptune’s wrath makes intuitive sense to many landlubbers: There’s so much energy out there, why not use it? Analysts at the International Energy Agency calculated that ocean and tidal energy could more than serve global power demand, if only it could be collected.
The problem, as Odysseus learned long ago, is that Poseidon does not submit to the will of mortals. The list of ocean energy installations that broke and sank upon contact with waves is long and amusing to those who didn’t dedicate years of painstaking labor and millions of dollars to the doomed endeavors. And energy options don’t exist in a vacuum: Wave power, with all the costs to fortify it against the ocean itself, must compete with mass-manufactured solar panels to produce the exact same commodity, electricity.
Braverman is well aware of wave energy’s soggy past and the money wasted on contraptions “that ended up broken to pieces on the shoreline.” Her diagnosis of the field’s misfires informs both the technological and the business strategy at Eco Wave Power.
The firm’s design favors simplicity across the board. Others tried installing out at sea, where waves are more powerful, but they rack up costs for ships and specialist divers, and then suffer from the same powerful waves they try to harness. Instead, Eco Wave Power focuses on far more accessible seawalls and jetties, and absorbs the waves with welded steel pontoons while the sensitive power conversion equipment sits safely on land nearby.
Financially, Braverman strives to prove a lot while spending very little. The company raised about $30 million from venture capitalists and from going public, first in Sweden and now on the Nasdaq, where it boasts a market cap of $51 million.
Eco Wave Power employs 15 people, and contracts out welding and installation to local firms. Braverman found strategic partners to share the cost of early installations — international energy company EDF invested in the 100-kilowatt Jaffa project, which began exporting to the Israeli grid in August 2023, and Shell Marine Renewable Energy co-invested in the LA system.
Last year, Eco Wave Power burned just $2 million, Braverman noted, and ended the first half of this year with $8 million in the bank. That demonstrates a refreshing asceticism compared to other cleantech startups that have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, built factories for novel energy products, and then gone out of business. (Natron, a sodium-ion battery company, seems to be the latest to follow this arc.)
Still, financial discipline only matters here in service of generating clean power from the ocean. After delivering one project this year, Braverman expects to clinch three installations next year, in Taiwan, India, and Portugal. The commercial performance at Porto, with the company’s own money on the line, will become key evidence to persuade banks to lend money for future expansions of this singular technology.
The raging surf hasn’t killed this idea yet, but it still has to placate the gods of finance.