Wave energy has a reputation problem. For decades it’s been the renewable that’s always five years away, the one that turns up as gorgeous concept art and confident press releases and then quietly vanishes before anything actually gets wet.
So it’s worth paying attention when a real machine, not a render, is bobbing in the Bay of Biscay and feeding electricity into the Spanish grid. It’s called the MARMOK-A-5, it stands 140 feet (42 m) tall, and Bilbao-based engineering firm IDOM towed an upgraded version out to a test site off the Basque coast in mid-May. It doesn’t make much power. The whole thing tops out around 30 kilowatts, which is closer to a handful of houses than a power station. But the wattage was never the point.