At a Glance

CalWave Fact Sheet

Return to the Pressroom

 

CalWave Inc. (CalWave) is a California-based wave energy technology developer that was founded out of UC Berkeley in 2014.


Our technology breaks through the fundamental challenges of unlocking wave power.

Our award-winning, proprietary wave energy converter (WEC) technology is called the xWave™.

The xWave™ is built on the game-changing industry advancements in which CalWave was awarded for through the US Department of Energy’s Wave Energy Prize. No other wave energy technology has high efficiency and wave load mitigation united in one architecture. The xWave™ achieves highest efficiency by operating fully autonomously and fully submerged which allows for protection from aggressive swells and storms, while also permitting energy capture from multiple degrees of freedom.

From a technical standpoint, what makes our technology special is that we’ve integrated novel wave load mechanism into the design similar to Pitch and Yaw control in modern wind turbines. Compared to a set as-is geometry once the device is manufactured, we can actively change the geometry of the wave absorber body to not only operate efficiently in small waves – but also to continue operation in severe sea states encompassing very large waves.

These landmark features enable for high performance and survivability at lowest cost which should lead to affordable energy prices once available to the market.

Additionally, the xWave™ encapsulates other critical aspects that bode well with the needs of varied end-users. Scalable in both design and functionality, energy farms that utilize the technology can supply coastal communities with anywhere from one to over 500 MW of local power. Further, the xWave™ achieves a minimum 40% capacity factor. The device is projected to be able to withstand over 20 years of use in open-ocean and has been designed to survive 100-year storm events. With operation and maintenance processes occurring on the surface via hot-swap capabilities, incurred costs are also predicted to be lower than those of other offshore energy technologies. The technology has also been deemed to have an acceptable environmental impact according to the latest State of Science report.


We have achieved significant milestones and work collaboratively with a range of key industry players.

A full list of our partners and supporters can be found here.


Our project pipeline allows us to scale up efficiently towards commercialization.

We successfully deployed our wave energy converter technology off the coast of San Diego in September 2021, marking California’s first at-sea, long-duration wave energy pilot. While CalWave’s pilot was contracted to operate for six months, a four month extension was granted by the U.S. Department of Energy for further data collection after the system surpassed initial expectations. The pilot unit, named x1, was recovered and decommissioned in July 2022. The findings from this project are informing CalWave’s next grid-connected deployment.

Following our pilot demonstration, CalWave will build a 200 kW version of the xWave™, called x200, and deploy the unit at PacWave South, the nation’s first accredited, grid-connected, pre-permitted, open-water wave energy test facility. This demonstration is scheduled to take place in 2026 and is the next step for enabling commercialization of our technology.

Learn more about our projects here.