Electric Power grids have to balance the intermittency of offshore wind with other energy sources, very often fossil fuels. Wave Power could provide stability with no CO2.

In the race against climate change, virtually every country is working to reduce their CO2 emissions, while the amount of energy being used around the world continues to climb. The press is on to shift more and more of our energy reliance to renewable energy, especially to mature clean energy technologies like wind and solar. But sometimes the wind blows and sometimes it doesn’t, and power grids were not created to handle that intermittency in large amounts. When electricity demand is mismatched with renewable energy supply, grid operators often turn to fossil fuels to even out the bumps, which can throw them off their emission goals. Ocean waves, which roll in 24/7 all year round, are a CO2-free solution to electric grid intermittancy challenges. Matching offshore wind with wave energy balances out that variability even more.

Ocean waves are a dense clean energy resource that show much less fluctuation over time than wind. They take longer to get going, and longer to stop, so they produce steadier hourly power. Even in a storm, ocean waves produce power more evenly, and are less capricious than wind, which can pick up and die quickly.

When you combine the relatively small peaks and valleys of wave power with the larger ones of wind energy, you find they are often complementary; when one is slowing, the other is speeding up. This means that together they can provide a more stable supply of renewable energy for the electric grid.

A combined offshore wind and wave energy power park could also create efficiencies through common permitting processes, shared use of expensive infrastructure such as sea cables, and more efficient use of sea area, leaving more of the coastline for activities like fishing and tourism.

Nature itself operates by having several systems working at once—filling in for and strengthening each other. Solar radiation creates the wind that generates waves, but all these clean energy sources operate at different times, creating unique climates for each location. Working with nature offers the best hope for a clean energy power grid. Seabased is excited about opportunities to expand commercialization of wave power together with offshore wind, both for new projects and as a supplement to existing ones. Our modular plug-and-play, wave-to-grid design makes this natural grid stabilizer possible.

Communities wind up with an affordable, stable electricity grid that runs on even more renewable energy. Grid operators meet their targets. And the earth is spared a lot of the CO2 that’s driving climate change.