We hear a lot about solar and wind power, but a renewable source of clean energy that continues to be largely untapped is the ocean. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the annual energy potential of waves off the coasts of the United States is 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours, or the equivalent of about 66% of this country’s electricity generation in 2020. Over the past two decades, many marine energy projects have sprung up around the world aiming to harness this seemingly limitless resource. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Andrea Copping, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, to catch the latest on wave energy. We learn about the various technologies, the benefits these projects present, potential regulatory hurdles, and the kinds of harmful effects they may have on marine life.

Narrator  0:01  This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Andrea Copping  0:15  I'm pretty bullish on this as a coastal system for small communities. And I believe as we get better with the technology, and we can bring the price down, I think they can be there right alongside offshore wind and solar providing to the national grids around the world.

Narrator  0:35  We hear a lot about solar and wind power. But a renewable source of clean energy that continues to be largely untapped is the ocean. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the annual energy potential of waves off the coast of the United States is 2.6 4 trillion kilowatt hours or the equivalent of about 66% of this country's electricity generation in 2020. Over the past two decades, many marine energy projects have sprung up around the world, aiming to harness this seemingly limitless resource. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Andrea Copping a senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest laboratory to catch the latest on wave energy. We learned about the various technologies, the benefits, these projects present, potential regulatory hurdles, and the kinds of harmful effects they may have on marine life.

Alex Wise  1:53  I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Andrea Copping. She is a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the University of Washington. Andrea, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Andrea Copping  2:07  Thank you. Glad to be here, Alex.

Alex Wise  2:10  So you've been studying marine energy for quite some time. And there are a lot of different types of ways to tackle this untapped potential source for energy. And there's projects underway in places like Korea, Canada, Denmark, Italy, I want to dive into some of those soon. But why don't you first kind of define what is marine energy, and then maybe kind of give us a snapshot of some of your latest research.

Andrea Copping  2:41  Great - happy to. By marine energy, we mean generating power from any aspect of seawater, it could be moving seawater, like tides, and waves, or ocean currents, or even the gradients in temperature and salinity. And we're not including offshore wind in this. So it's everything in the water. And as we try to develop this newest entry into the low carbon portfolio for many nations of renewables, we realize there's a necessity to protect the oceans. At the same time, the animals, the habitats, even the systems that run the ocean, make it operate as it is. And what my group and I have been doing for over a decade now is trying to anticipate those potential environmental effects. Understand the research that's been done, what do we know what still needs to be done? And pursue that research? So we look at a variety of what we call stressor receptor interactions, what are the parts of the system stressing the animals and the habitats, and the receptors,