Oregon Sea Grant

The solutions to today’s energy challenges need to be explored through alternative, renewable and clean energy sources to enable a diverse national energy resource plan. An extremely abundant and promising source of energy exists in the world’s oceans. Ocean energy exists in the forms of wave, tidal, marine currents, thermal (temperature gradient) and salinity. Among these forms, significant opportunities and benefits have been identified in the area of ocean wave energy extraction, i.e., harnessing the motion of the ocean waves, and converting that motion into electrical energy. Wave energy can be considered a concentrated form of solar energy in that it is the uneven heating of the earth’s surface that creates the winds, and it is the wind that generates the waves. With the west to east traveling global winds, the west coasts of land masses see the greatest wave energy potential, and those potentials increase toward the earth’s poles.