Hey, I'm Flora Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today on the show, the quest to generate electricity from the ocean.

Waves have a huge amount of energy in them, but they move slow.

Solar, wind, geothermal, we've figured out how to harness energy from many natural Earth systems.

But what about waves?

You'd think that converting wave power to electricity on a mass scale might have been figured out by now.

But the tech is actually just getting its sea legs.

So why has this been so hard to develop and just how promising is it? We're starting off first with a look at one of the biggest wave energy projects in the world with the help of Jess Burns,

Science and Environment Reporter at OPB, and host of all science, no fiction, based in Portland,

Oregon. Jess, welcome back to Science Friday. Oh, thank you for having me. So you've reported on

this wave energy testing site. It's off the coast of Oregon. Help me picture it, first of all.

Well, it's kind of hard to picture because it's pretty invisible out in the ocean, right?

So basically, okay, picture in your mind a giant rectangle that's like one by two miles big,

roughly.

That rectangle is then divided into four equal parts, and each one of those parts

is considered a birth for wave energy testing. And so four different companies can come in

and deploy their buoys there. Oh, so they're floating? Yeah're floating. Yeah, they're floating, yeah, they're

floating but tethered to the bottom. How about that? Now, what you don't see is that along the

bottom, there is infrastructure that's basically a place where these wave energy devices can hook

into these cables that can transport the electricity they produce and all the

data about how the different buoys are performing along a cable back to shore where the developers

can kind of look at the performance, assess what's happening, how things are holding up,

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