🌐 The Missing Renewable: Wave Power Comes Ashore

Wave energy has always had one big problem: the ocean.

It's an unforgiving place to put a machine. Time and again, a promising device goes into the water, survives the calm, and breaks in the storm. Or it survives the storm but can't generate enough energy to make the economics work. Getting both right — at the same time, reliably, at commercial scale — has defeated just about everyone who's tried.

CorPower Ocean is a Swedish wave energy company built to solve both problems at once. Its technology is inspired by a principle borrowed from the human heart — using stored pressure to generate energy in both directions on every single wave. Its spherical buoys have survived waves over 50 feet tall in the Atlantic Ocean. 

The company is now building its first commercial wave farms off the coasts of Portugal and Scotland.

When those farms come online, wave energy won't just be another renewable source. Its production profile doesn't correlate with wind or solar — it produces when they don't. Therefore, adding it to the mix makes the whole system more affordable.

Studies by the University of Edinburgh, McKinsey, and LUT show the same result: in any given geography, the optimal low-cost clean energy mix always includes a certain amount of wave energy.

Catharina Belfrage Sahlstrand is CorPower's Chief Commercial Officer. She started her career in corporate law, moved into debt capital markets where she led sustainable finance and green bonds, and went on to serve as Chief Sustainability Officer of a Nordic bank.

That background — structuring complex deals, understanding risk, knowing what financiers and offtakers need before they'll commit — is exactly what commercializing wave energy requires.

Here's what stood out from our conversation.

The grid needs an energy source that produces when the others don't.

"It fills the gap of sun and wind, for instance, when the sun doesn't shine. So thereby it's an enabler of firm, clean, 24-7 consistent energy that's predictable — and without resorting to fossil fuels."

Wave energy's defining advantage isn't output — it's consistency.

The buoy can make itself invisible to a storm.

"The buoy itself can make itself transparent in waves — it can sort of sit beneath the cusp of the waves and thereby protect itself and then go back online. And when the magic happens is also the phase control technology that amplifies its motion in every single wave to make it very, very powerful when it does come back online."

Storm survivability and power production aren't two different design goals at CorPower — they're achieved by the same mechanism.

Scale doesn't mean building bigger. It means building more.

"We don't build bigger and bigger and bigger devices. I think that we have at this point as close as possible to the optimal size of a device. Instead, we just place more of them out there in a dense array. So it's like Lego pieces."

The modular approach means the path to scale is to add units, not to engineer bigger ones.

The wrong question is "how much does wave energy cost?" The right question is what it does to the overall cost.

"Wave power actually doesn't have to be as cheap as solar or wind in order to be picked up in the mix and bring down the cost all in all. And maybe that is where we should be having our focus."

By filling gaps in generation that would otherwise require storage, wave energy can cut the need for batteries by 50 to 90 percent.

The ocean is stored wind power. It's already a battery.

"For us, the ocean is, in essence, stored wind power. In that sense, it is a battery. Let's not over-install on anything unless we have to. If there's a more clever solution, that would be the optimal mix."

As storage rises up the utility agenda, wave power has an opening it didn't have five years ago.

De-risking the deal is as important as de-risking the technology.

"We need to build a package — a full turnkey solution of everything from project finance to an equity investor to an offtake agreement — and make sure that we've shed ourselves of all of the risks that will scare any of those above away from our solution."

Catharina's job at CorPower isn't just proving the buoy works — it's building the financial architecture that lets utilities, developers, and offtakers commit.

The first farms are the proof point that changes everything.

"Still, to date, we have yet to see a wave energy solution come out there at a large utility scale. So there's no one yet."

When the Portugal and Scotland farms come online, wave energy will no longer be a promise but an expectation.

Supercool Takeaway

CorPower has survived the storms, engineered the economics, and is now building the first commercial wave farms in history. What happens next takes us into a new, clean-energy future.

Operator Takeaways

Sell the system, not the unit. A single megawatt of wave energy may look expensive. A grid that needs half as many batteries because of it does not.

The deal structure is part of the product. A technology that can't be financed doesn't scale.

Being first in a category means educating the market and selling into it at the same time. It's a harder job. It's also a defensible one.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

The House That Rice Built: Modern Mill’s Breakthrough Building Material

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

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ARQIV: The 2029 Wall AI's Buildout Is About to Hit

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I was in Raleigh earlier this week for a live taping of the Supercool podcast during Climate Tech Day at Raleigh-Durham Startup Week. My interview with Kathryn Polkoff, co-founder & CEO of Hoofprint Biome, will air in the next few weeks.

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