Thomas Friedman, Nobel prize-winning author, can articulate the reasons better than anyone why we need renewable energy sources in an interview he did with Foreign Policy in September 2008:

“I would point to five problems, and they’re all related: energy and resource supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, biodiversity loss, and energy poverty. They all have one solution: abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons. The search for and the discovery of a source of those electrons is going to be the next great global industry.”

Finding a clean, reliable source of electricity will be my generation’s Manhattan Project or Apollo Project. Just as having the first atomic bomb or the first human presence on the moon can provide a sense of national security, so can these technologies. We need that kind of support from the American government in order for real innovation to occur.

However, this problem is different from the development of the A-bomb in a crucial way. There is no silver bullet. One piece of technology cannot create useful energy or else we would have to rewrite our thermodynamics textbooks. In order to power the future we will need an arsenal of weapons-- wind, solar, geothermal.... and ocean.

While the US has a large resource for wave, tidal and offshore wind off the coast of New England, the west coast and Alaska, major developments in the marine energy industry are happening in Europe. Throughout Ireland, Denmark, Scotland, the UK, researchers, governments and companies are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to see their goal come to fruition. Thus, as an American student of ocean energy, I need to travel to Europe to see first-hand the advancements in this industry.