Tag Archives: energy

Wave Energy Just Cleared Its Biggest Hurdle in 7 Years

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We have been talking about wave energy for decades. It shows up in climate briefings, TED talks, and renewable energy roadmaps with the same promising but perpetually tentative language: potential, emerging, coming soon. So when a company actually delivers a milestone that moves it out of the “maybe someday” category, it deserves more than a passing mention in a news ticker.

CorPower Ocean, a Swedish cleantech company, just did exactly that. Their C4 wave energy converter became the first of its kind to earn a full DNV Prototype Certificate, the most rigorous safety certification in offshore energy. DNV, for those unfamiliar, is the Norwegian firm whose standards essentially underpin the modern offshore wind industry. Getting their stamp of approval is not a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It’s proof of work.

Designer: CorPower Ocean

The C4 itself is a striking piece of engineering. It’s a 100-ton buoy, roughly the height of a four-storey building, and it converts ocean swells into electricity using a mechanism inspired by the pumping principle of the human heart. The company calls it WaveSpring technology, and the idea is that the device resonates with the natural rhythm of incoming waves rather than fighting against them. That design philosophy results in a device that can generate five times more electricity per tonne than any other known wave technology, more than 10 megawatt-hours per tonne. For a sector that has always struggled with the cost-versus-output equation, that number is significant.

What makes the DNV certification particularly meaningful is how difficult it was to earn. The process took seven years and covered everything from concept development and structural analysis to manufacturing, storm survivability, and real ocean performance. The C4 was deployed off the coast of Aguçadoura in northern Portugal in late 2023, and it weathered four major storms during that period, including waves reaching 18.5 metres in height. It didn’t just survive. It resumed exporting power to the grid after each one.

I think about that a lot because it’s the part of wave energy that rarely gets enough credit. The ocean is brutal. Most renewable energy infrastructure, whether solar panels or wind turbines, operates in relatively predictable conditions. Wave energy converters have to function in one of the most hostile environments on the planet, and the failure rate in this space historically has been high. The fact that the C4 emerged from the Atlantic with its certification intact says a great deal about the maturity of the technology.

Now, CorPower is looking at the next phase: the VianaWave project, which would become the world’s first 10-megawatt commercial wave farm, also off the coast of Portugal, targeted for around 2029 to 2030. A project in Scotland is also in the works. The DNV certification is crucial here not just for optics but for practical reasons. It reduces technology risk in the eyes of investors, insurers, and project financiers who have historically been reluctant to back wave energy ventures. Bankability has always been the bottleneck, and this certification directly addresses that.

Wave energy won’t replace solar or wind. Nobody is suggesting that. But it has something those two sources don’t: it’s consistent. Waves roll in day and night, regardless of cloud cover or calm weather. As a complement to variable renewables, that kind of reliability carries real weight. The ocean covers 71 percent of the planet’s surface, and the commercially available wave energy potential sits at around 500 gigawatts, roughly 10 percent of global electricity consumption. That’s not a footnote resource.

The C4 is not a finished product. CorPower is already developing its next iteration, the C5, alongside the rollout of the current technology. But as a proof of concept that has cleared the toughest bar the industry has, it marks something real: wave energy is no longer hypothetical. The certification doesn’t just validate a buoy. It validates years of work spent turning an elegant idea into something the ocean itself has agreed to cooperate with.

The post Wave Energy Just Cleared Its Biggest Hurdle in 7 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

IDOM’s 42-Meter Steel Buoy Just Proved Wave Energy Can Actually Work

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Off the rugged coast of Bilbao, quietly bobbing in the Bay of Biscay, is a 42-meter steel buoy most people have never heard of. It has no viral launch campaign, no sleek consumer interface, and no celebrity endorsement attached to it. But the MARMOK-A-5, designed by Spanish engineering firm IDOM, just did something that deserves far more attention than it’s getting. It may be one of the more quietly significant design stories of the year.

In May 2026, an updated version of the MARMOK-A-5 was successfully deployed at the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP), off the coast of Bilbao, as part of the EuropeWave Pre-Commercial Procurement program. IDOM is one of three finalists competing for a share of a €13.4 million budget to develop and test next-generation wave energy technology. And unlike a lot of clean energy news that tends to stay in the realm of promises and projections, this one is already in the water, already connected to the grid, and already generating real-world data.

Designer: IDOM

The MARMOK-A-5 is a wave energy converter, and it works on a principle that’s almost elegant in its simplicity. The main structure is a floating spar buoy, 5 meters in diameter and weighing 162 tons. Inside it sits a cylindrical water column. As ocean waves pass through, the water inside rises and falls like a piston. That motion compresses and expands an air chamber at the top of the buoy, and the resulting rush of air spins a turbine. That turbine generates electricity, which travels to shore through a subsea cable. No burning, no drilling, no fuel. Just water moving the way it always has.

The technology has been in development for years. IDOM first deployed the original MARMOK-A-5 at BiMEP back in 2016, making it the first wave energy converter ever connected to the Spanish state electricity grid. That alone was historic. The version now in the water is significantly upgraded, featuring a newly developed power take-off system, controllable turbine blades, onboard batteries, and intelligent control systems built to optimize performance in real, unpredictable high-seas conditions.

What strikes me about this project is how deliberately it was built. Every iteration, every sea campaign, fed into a deeper understanding of how ocean energy behaves at scale. IDOM didn’t rush to market. They observed, adjusted, and came back smarter. The redesigned system focuses on improving power performance while keeping the one quality that sea deployments demand above all else: reliability. A beautiful machine that can’t survive the North Atlantic is just expensive wreckage.

Among the milestones from this latest deployment, one is worth calling out: the MARMOK-A-5 is now the first WEC to connect electrically to the grid through the HarshLab buoy at BiMEP. It sounds like a technical footnote, but it’s a meaningful shift in how ocean energy infrastructure can be tested and eventually scaled. The ability to gather live, grid-connected data from a genuinely harsh marine environment is exactly the kind of proof point that moves wave energy from “promising concept” to “serious contender.”

Wave energy has long sat in the shadow of wind and solar. It’s messier to engineer, harder to deploy, and slower to scale. But it has one clear advantage that doesn’t get discussed enough: oceans are predictable. Waves don’t stop at night and don’t pause on cloudy days, and the world’s coastlines happen to overlap heavily with its most energy-hungry regions. The ocean covers more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface, and most of that constant motion still goes completely untapped. The MARMOK-A-5 is still a prototype, rated at just 30 kilowatts. But prototypes are how industries start.

I keep thinking about how much of what will eventually power our lives is currently sitting, mostly unnoticed, off some coast. Not announced with a keynote. Not trending. Just quietly working, enduring salt and storm, sending electricity down a cable while the rest of us scroll past. The MARMOK-A-5 might be one of the least glamorous objects in clean energy right now. But it might also be one of the most important.

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