I'm standing on the grayish-white sands of Malibu Beach in Southern California, watching autumn waves crash upon the wet tide-line. It's early morning and a damp mist hangs over the blue-grey waves. The sun has come up, but the world is solemn on this overcast day. I sniff the salt-brine air and gaze out to sea where a few sailboats straddle the sharp line between the water and sky.
Suddenly, I feel my heart jump. I've just spotted a pod of dolphins two hundred yards off the coast. A dozen slick gray bodies effortlessly arc in and out of the water. I can almost hear them crashing into the foamy waves. They remind me of a procession of dancers leaping across a stage. It's like a scene out of some Discovery Channel nature show, only this is real. For a inland-born person like me, seeing live dolphins in their natural habitat for the first time is thrilling. On this somber morning, I feel happy to be alive. In a few minutes the dolphins exit, stage right, and I'm left listening to the waves and the squawks of seagulls calling to each other on the morning breeze.
This is the world of the ancient waters. For hundreds of millions of years the ocean has followed a strict imperative. It is continuously pulled and pushed by the gravity linking the earth and moon. This is the ocean tide.
The Ocean's Power at Our Fingertips
At Stanford University in Palo Alto California, a group of experts gathers to discuss the feasibility of converting the energy of the ocean's waves into electricity that can be fed into power grids. Harnessing wave power is akin to collecting wind and solar power. The resources that create the energy-water, wind, and sun-are free and theoretically limitless. But the start-up costs, both for research and implementation, are formidable. While wind and solar power production are already in full swing, wave power lags behind.
Edwin Feo, a partner at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, & McCloy, a law firm t...