Every couple of years somebody tells you the ocean is about to start powering your house, and it’s a good pitch. Waves keep rolling in at 3 a.m. and in February, which is more than solar panels can say, and water’s dense enough that a fairly small machine sitting in it can do real work.
So why isn’t there a wave farm off your coast?
Part of the answer is that until two weeks ago, nobody in the continental U.S. had a pre-permitted patch of ocean where you could drop a full-size machine, plug it into the grid and sell what came out. Now there’s one. Oregon State University opened PacWave South on August 27, about seven miles off Newport, Oregon, and roughly 150 people turned up to watch OSU president Jayathi Murthy cut a ribbon with a comically oversized pair of scissors. There’s still nothing in the water.
What’s out there is cable. Four of them, each running about 12 miles from the test site back under Driftwood Beach to a connection building near Seal Rock, which is where the power can be put onto the local grid. OSU puts the total at nearly 50 miles of line. Every cable’s rated at 5 megawatts and feeds its own test berth, so four companies can run at once and the site tops out at 20 megawatts with as many as 20 machines out there.
OSU has the expensive half done and paid for. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission licensed the site for 25 years in March 2021, construction wrapped in early 2025, and the Bonneville Power Administration signed a power contract later that year to buy whatever the test machines make through 2030. Central Lincoln People’s Utility District passes it on to local homes and businesses once there’s something to pass on. The Energy Department has put nearly $150 million into siting and building the place since 2016, according to the Associated Press.
So what does pre-permitted get you?
You don’t hear much about the permitting, which is a shame, because that’s where the years go. PacWave describes the regulatory work behind its 25-year federal license as close to a decade of effort, which is longer than most of these startups have existed.
Say I weld a wave generator together in a shed in Portland and I want to know if it survives an Oregon winter. On my own I’d spend years and most of my funding buying permission to find out, and I’d still have an untested machine at the end of it. Here the paperwork’s already done, and it covers point absorbers, oscillating water columns and attenuators, so I show up with the thing, rent a berth and plug in. OSU is selling that permission as much as it’s selling the cable.
Those three names cover most of what the industry builds, and you’ll run into all of them if you follow this stuff. A point absorber is basically a buoy that bobs and drives a generator with the up and down. An oscillating water column is a box with its bottom open to the sea, so the water inside works like a piston and shoves air through a turbine in the roof. An attenuator is a long floating machine that flexes at the joints as waves roll underneath. None of them needs a fresh environmental study to go in the water here.
The Navy got to the grid first
There’s a qualifier in every careful description of this site, and it’s there for a reason. PacWave South is the first pre-permitted, grid-connected wave energy test site in the continental United States. It isn’t the first in the country.
The Navy’s had one off Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kaneohe Bay for years, with three berths in roughly 100, 200 and 260 feet of water and cables running into the base grid, and a 20-kilowatt device called Azura started feeding that grid back in 2015. Oregon adds size and a customer. Each berth here takes up to 5 megawatts against about 1 megawatt per device in Hawaii, and BPA is buying the output on a commercial contract instead of a research arrangement. For scale on the other side of the Atlantic, a breakwater in the Basque town of Mutriku has been pushing 296 kilowatts into the Spanish grid since July 2011, and one berth off Oregon is rated at 17 times that.
The Energy Department’s resource tables put the technical wave resource across the whole U.S. exclusive economic zone at 1,400 terawatt-hours a year, or 34 percent of American generation, with 770 of those terawatt-hours sitting within 10 nautical miles of the beach. That 770 is the useful figure, because nobody’s running an export cable 200 miles out to a buoy.
So where are the machines?
Nowhere, yet. The site hasn’t generated a watt because no wave energy converter has turned up, and developers are waiting on federal money, according to the AP’s reporting on the opening. So what’s holding up American wave power this month is an invoice, which is a new kind of problem for a sector that’s used to losing its machines in storms.
There’s also a review step that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. PacWave director Dan Hellin told the AP that after the change of administration in 2025, PacWave had to clear a go/no-go review at the Energy Department that needed the energy secretary’s sign-off before it could open. He said that approval came through last summer and the grid hookup happened this summer. The department’s stated reason for liking wave power is an unusual one: it says these machines are “uniquely suited to provide power sources for national security applications”, by which it means remote sensors, underwater drones and power for forward operating bases. Your living room comes later.
The machine most likely to go in first is CalWave’s x200, a 200-kilowatt generator that hangs underwater instead of floating, and we wrote about it in July when the berths were empty then too. I can’t find a firm installation date for it. PacWave hasn’t named which developer goes first either. At 200 kilowatts that machine would use one percent of the site’s 20-megawatt ceiling, so year one out here is about proving the plumbing works.
The installation window shuts at the end of September
Wave energy has a season on that coast and it’s short. Hellin told KLCC, the public radio station in Eugene, that the workable stretch for putting hardware in the water runs from mid-May through the end of September, and that missing it costs you six months rather than a couple of weeks. Winter out there is exactly the sea state these machines are built to ride out. It’s also a miserable time to be lowering one onto a mooring off the back of a boat.
OSU cut the ribbon on August 27 and the Energy Department declared the site open for business on September 1. Hellin put it plainly at the ceremony: “PacWave is built, PacWave is grid connected and PacWave is operational.” His own window closes in about three weeks, so if nothing’s out there by then, the first wave-powered electricity sold off Oregon probably waits until May.
