After a brief hiatus this spring, the BERC Blog is back! Today, I'll be interviewing Marcus Lehmann, the Co-Founder and CEO of CalWave Power Technologies and a former Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's Theoretical & Applied Fluid Dynamics Lab (TAFLab).
Marcus Lehmann, CEO and Co-Founder of CalWave and former Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley.
CalWave is using wave power to generate 100% carbon-free electricity, harnessing energy from the waves created by wind blowing over the ocean. Note that wave power falls under the broader "hydrokinetics" umbrella, which also includes technology like run-of-the-river hydropower and tidal energy. Unlike wind and solar, which are both highly intermittent, wave energy is a renewable resource that operates on a much more consistent basis across the course of the day. Additionally, wave movement tends to peak in the winter, when both solar and wind are below their average levels; when these resources are combined, they can provide a more baseload-type generation profile, at least on a seasonal timescale. There's been a lot of recent excitement around wave energy: the EIA estimated in 2021 that waves off the US coast could generate up to 2.6 trillion kWh of electricity, which is equivalent to ~60% of all utility-scale generation in the US today.
Wave energy provides a more consistent generation profile than wind or solar.
CalWave was founded by Marcus back in 2014, with co-founders Thomas Boerner and Nigel Kojimoto coming on board shortly thereafter. In 2021, the company deployed its pilot system, x1, off the coast of San Diego. The project was a success, spending 10 months in the water and running at 99% system uptime, even during major storms. The company is now preparing to deploy a grid-connected pilot of the x200, CalWave's first commercial-sale unit, at a 20 MW wave center in Oregon called PacWave. CalWave plans to offer the x200 to the market in 2026, alongside even larger units. I sat down (virtually) with Marcus to chat more about his company and the future of ocean energy.
Remy Freire: To start, I'd like to hear a bit more about the history of CalWave. What gave you the idea for the company? Who else was involved in its creation? How did you go about getting funding for the initial research and eventual pilot project?
Marcus Lehmann: My passion for renewable energy started in high school back in Germany, but the inspiration for CalWave really came from Reza Alam, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Berkeley. Dr. Alam is very interested in geomimicry, that is, building machines that operate like naturally occurring geological processes. While I was in his lab, Dr. Alam was working on a device he called the "wave carpet", which absorbs energy from waves as they pass over it. As it turns out, the mud that sits on the seafloor is naturally able to perform this absorption very well; fishermen have known for hundreds of years to steer their boats toward muddy parts of the shore during storms.
To get CalWave up and running, we received support from CITRIS Foundry, and were then accepted into the very first cohort at Cyclotron Road (now under Activate.org), an accelerator for climate technology out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Early on, we also partnered with a team at UC Berkeley through the Cleantech to Market program that helped us secure funding via the Department of Energy's Wave Energy Prize. Most of our capital since then has come in the form of grants, including from the DOE and NSF.
CalWave’s x1 demonstration project, which was live off the coast of San Diego in 2021-22.
RF: When I think of electricity being generated via kinetic energy, I usually think of a turbine, where magnets are spun to generate an electric current. What goes on inside the CalWave system, that is, how are the systems able to translate the linear movement of waves into energy?
ML: We rely on a drive train, which is actually very similar to the drive trains used in the heads of wind turbines. It's using all industrially available components, although we are agnostic as far as the mechanism for the drive train goes. When a wave falls, we're able to convert that linear motion into torque, which spins a generator inside the system to create electricity. This is similar to how electric and hybrid vehicles use regenerative braking to impart additional energy to the battery when descending a hill.
RF: Tell me a bit more about the business model of the company. How are you all thinking about product-market fit, and what kinds of customers or sites are you targeting?
ML: The three main target market segments we identified are isolated microgrids, offshore assets, and co-location with offshore wind. For isolated microgrids, think remote or island communities that don't have access to the main grid, and instead rely today on generators and imported diesel fuel. One interesting data point is that in Guam, a US territory in the Pacific Ocean, each gallon of diesel fuel imported to the island requires large multiples of additional gallons of fuel for shipping – it's unbelievably inefficient. Earlier this year, we were selected to provide wave energy to the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation (MMFN), an indigenous community living on an isolated island off the coast of British Columbia.
Offshore assets could include anything from fuel production (like hydrogen and ammonia), to ocean carbon removal sites, to even offshore data centers, like Microsoft's Project Natick. And in terms of co-locating with offshore wind, we see a lot of promise here. Wind energy is highly intermittent, so wave energy helps smooth out the generation profile of an offshore wind farm. In fact, paired wave + wind systems have been shown to have a capacity factor up to 90%, vs. 40-50% for wind alone.
RF: How about unit economics and pricing?
ML: Our goal is to be cost-competitive with offshore wind, at a price point of around $0.05-10 per kWh. We expect to come down the learning curve quite quickly, somewhere between 250 and 500 units of cumulative production volume.
In the meantime, there are a couple of areas where offshore wind isn't possible, for example, in places that have strong hurricane seasons or where the visual impact of wind turbines is a non-starter. Gavin Newsom, when he was mayor of San Francisco, actually designated an area off of Ocean Beach specifically for wave energy. Note that our systems pay for themselves in 2-4 years, which is a much shorter timeline than most renewables projects. Also, a CalWave system uses only 5-10% of the area and 10-20% of the steel of an offshore wind turbine, per unit of capacity.
Behind the scenes: the x1, under construction in the lab.
RF: Have you run into any issues regarding the effects of your technology on marine ecosystems?
ML: It's a topic that every investor brings up, and there are a few categories of concern that are monitored by an international coalition focused on ocean-based energy and its impacts on ecosystems called OES-Environmental. These include risk of collision with wildlife, underwater noise, electromagnetic fields, and a couple of others that aren't as applicable to CalWave.
These are things we're constantly checking for, and so far, the science points very strongly to the fact that marine energy systems, including our systems, have no material impact on wildlife in the ocean. All of the moving parts are inside the system, and it's clearly visible to mammals, which mitigates the major risks. In fact, OES just released their 2024 "State of the Science" report in May, which found CalWave's system to have no discernable impact on marine life.
RF: I've read that some companies have tried wave energy in the past, but saw little to no success commercializing. What challenges do you think those companies weren't able to overcome, and how will CalWave solve them?
ML: You're right, there were a couple of companies during the "Clean Tech 1.0" generation of technology in the early 2000s. In my eyes, these companies grew too big, too quickly. Moreover, there's been significant recent progress on the modeling and analytics required to develop wave energy systems. CalWave has been able to build simulation models that were not possible even 5 years ago, due to a lack of computing power and the prohibitive cost of sensors and real-time operations for hardware testing. For example, we've been running advanced simulations to model the dynamics of the ocean, powered by supercomputers over at Lawrence Berkeley. There's also been a huge push from large companies, especially in the tech industry, on net zero commitments. Part of the implementation for these commitments includes more sophisticated carbon offsets like time-based renewable energy certificates (such as Google's T-EACs), which necessitate the hourly matching that wave energy can provide.
RF: Anything else you'd like to share before we wrap up?
ML: Would love to give a big shoutout to all the folks at Berkeley who have been instrumental to CalWave's growth these past few years. This includes the TAFLab where I got my start, the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship, Berkeley Law, Haas' Cleantech to Market program, BERC, and broader support from the Mechanical, Environmental, and Civil Engineering departments. Of course, I also have to shout out the CITRIS Foundry and Cyclotron Road/Activate programs and the legal clinics at UC Berkeley who took us on and helped push our company forward from a commercial perspective. I can't think of a better place to have launched our company, and I know that our progress wouldn't have been possible without all the support from the Berkeley entrepreneurship ecosystem. In fact, we just had the great honor of being invited by the UC Board of Regents and President Michael V. Drake, M.D., to present CalWave's story at the Innovation Showcase with California Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (see Five genius inventions that grew out of UC research | University of California).
2024 Innovation Showcase with California Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin.
CalWave at the BERC Innovation Expo awards in 2013 and 2014.