The first wave energy project in the U.S. is coming to the Port of LA. Here’s how it works

Listen to Marketplace each weekday at 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on LAist 89.3-FM. This report originally aired on “Marketplace” on Feb. 11, 2025.

In renewable energy, the holy grail is a source of energy that is always available. Solar and wind power might be the most common, but there are times when they don’t work because the sun is down and the wind is calm.

Ocean waves, especially in Southern California, come in steady supply. One company is aiming to harness power from those waves with a pilot project at the Port of Los Angeles.

The star of the program is a blue, sedan-sized piece of metal sitting on the pier, waiting to get put in the water. Its whole purpose is to bob up and down on the ocean’s waves. When a bunch of these floats sit next to each other, they look like a series of piano keys that rise and fall with each wave.

AltaSea, a nonprofit that develops the sustainable ocean economy, is shepherding the program at the Port of Los Angeles.

“There’s this piston arm attached to the float that acts like a bicycle pump. So as the float goes up and down, so does this bicycle pump arm,” said AltaSea Chief Executive Terry Tamminen.

Instead of going into a bicycle tire, the air gets shoved into a series of what look like really long scuba diving tanks behind the floats.

“When you want the energy, you release the pressure from here, it spins the turbine, and now you have stored intermittent renewables without a battery,” Tamminen said.

The pistons attached to the floaters forces pressurized air into the red tanks on the right.

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Caleigh Wells

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Marketplace

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The floats are designed to attach to a breakwater or a jetty. They’ll be mounted to a concrete pier on the port’s main channel and brought online next month. There isn’t a penny of federal money going into the pilot project. In fact, it was paid for in part by a major oil company. The company supplying the floats is Eco Wave Power. Its founder, Inna Braverman, said most wave energy companies so far have failed because they’ve set up installations way out at sea.

“That was extremely expensive, because you need ships, you need divers, you need underwater mooring, you need cables. It was breaking down all the time, because in the offshore, you get extremely high waves,” Braverman said.

The ocean moves floats up and down, but it also jostles them side to side, and the salt water corrodes them.

“It is really, really difficult to work in the ocean, and to have things operate in the ocean, especially things that have to move,” said Samantha Quinn, program director with the climate solutions nonprofit Pacific Ocean Energy.

On top of all that, different states and countries have different environmental regulations. “You sometimes have to redesign parts of your devices to be able to go into a specific location,” she said.

So it’s expensive, it can only be built in specific spots and it’s prone to breaking. Plus, this pilot project will generate enough energy to power about 80 households. That’s not even close to competing with wind and solar.

But Quinn said that’s not a fair comparison. Those technologies are decades ahead in this race.

“Solar and wind didn’t just happen overnight. It really did take a long time for those to be developed, and we are following a very similar innovation path that solar and wind did,” Quinn said.