Brilliant idea for ocean based power generation on front page of the Financial Times yesterday

[Pluvious]

Imagine a super heavy floating ocean buoy bopping on the surface of the deep ocean, with its extended underside "tail" in the shape of a funnel - its up/down motion pushing water up into the top sphere, building up high pressure to push out the water through several turbines

Quite a brilliant concept - the full scale prototype was quite amazing (see video)

Homepage:
https://panthalassa.com

Live test (ten months ago):

[NNadir]

1. We never run out of ideas to destroy ecosystems for...

...so called "renewable energy."

It's surprising to end up here on the left in Ayn Rand heaven.

[ihaveaquestion]

5. You think this will destroy the ocean ecosystem somehow?

Or are you saying the opposite in some obtuse way I'm not understanding?

[GB_RN]

13. Gotta Admit...

I’m as confused as you are. Charitable possibility: Perhaps he/she didn’t read the whole thing and misunderstood what was read.

Cynical possibility: Trolling? 🤷‍♂️

[WestMichRad]

16. Know your trolls.

This one is an avid pro-nuke, anti-renewables curmudgeonly (?) scientist who has long been posting (usually detailed scientific info) here. Lots of useful and informative stuff, but his bias on energy issues is… relentless. Nevertheless, I’m glad he’s on our side of most issues.

[ihaveaquestion]

18. OK, that makes sense then. Sad that they have to trash other's ideas, but scientists aren't always nice people. nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

28. You know... I've worked with a good number of scientists. A few of them I call "friends."

They are people of course, some of them are more social than others.

I have never known one as unpleasant/antisocial as NNadir.

NNadir is opposed to anything which is not nuclear. Batteries are bad. Hydrogen and renewables are equated with fossil fuels. NNadir is hostile to anyone who does not adhere rigidly to his zealously held “nothing but nukes” belief system.

[NNadir]

32. Thank you for recognizing my position on energy.

Your remarks about my personality reflect a filter. I definitely hold a less than generous view of people whose scientific ignorance, of say, the second law of thermodynamics, for one example, which underlies the battery and hydrogen based fossil fuel greenwashing that goes on around here, the implications of mass to energy ratios for another.

At the end of my life I am certainly selective on my social relationships, who I value and those who I hold in a range between distaste and outright contempt.

Where one falls in that range is a function of the level of hypocrisy for one thing. We are all hypocrites to some extent. I am. I drive a hybrid car that gets excellent gas mileage for instance, but I am aware of the enormous moral cost of batteries, the human slaves who labor under horrific conditions to mine cobalt for batteries, the the general unsustainablily of the car CULTure in general. The car requires fossil fuels to run, and even if it has the lowest carbon intensity of any car on the PJM grid, it is still a dirty device.

My environmental views have always been guided by respect for wilderness. I have never had an ounce of respect, none, for people who look at wilderness and see an opportunity for land development for short lived industrial energy plants strewn across millions of square kilometers, trashed riverine and riparian zones. I also consider the oceans to be a valuable wilderness. For another example, I am aware of the carbon retention of the desert ecosystem's root matrices that all of our antinukes think should be rendered with bulldozing into solar industrial parks.

Thus I have even less respect for clowns crying crocodile tears for climate issues while applauding the destruction not only of benthic zones on continental shelves, but also the upper oceanic layers of water as proposed in this latest example of rotely applauded nonsense. Whence the wire to connect this shit? Whence the metal to make it?

I have spent most of my life in science. In my private life I more or less live and breathe it. I don't have a "few friends" who are scientists. Almost everyone I know in my professional life is a scientist. Not all of them are nice people, nor do they need to be nice people to do good science.

They only needed to do good science to be good scientists.

None other than Issac Newton, for example, was an asshole on a personal level. He took personal pleasure in signing death warrants of counterfeiters in his honorary role as Warden of the Mint. Albert Einstein was a terrible psychologically abusive husband to his first wife, who was a good scientist herself.

One can take a certain level of satisfaction in who doesn't like oneself. I do, right here at DU.

My views on energy have been formulated outside of my professional life, and are based on tens of thousands of hours over close to 40 years of work in the primary scientific literature, attendance at high level scientific meetings and lectures and personal reflections calculations and discussions. If there are dilletants with superficial knowledge whining and crying that they don't like me, who drool with disrespect for my efforts while musing illiterately that we should tear the shit out of the planet's seas and land for short term bourgeois unsustainable affectations related to so called "renewable energy," this will in no way offend me.

Nor does it dissuade me from my profound admiration for the work of the finest minds of the 20th century, who discovered nuclear energy, a tool with the potential, with all its risks understood, to save the world, only to have their work trashed and demeaned by intellectual Lilliputians.

I have no apologies for what I do here, nor my scientific knowledge nor my choices about whom I chose to respect or decline to respect. In turn, I am unmoved by those who hold me in barely disguised contempt, and again, can indeed take some satisfaction, indeed pleasure, from it.

No one in the antinuke cults should hold their breaths expecting me to apologize for my personality. They'll die faster than the planet they've done do much to kill.

Have a nice day.

[magicarpet]

2. I want one of these for my bathtub,....

.... I think I need a bigger bathtub ?

Alternate energy is the solution to forever wars with the resultant maiming and killing of our young men.

[ChicagoTeamster]

3. They could also put windmills and solar panels on it creating even more energy

[Auggie]

4. Awesome

I'd rather know these are at work in the ocean than oil rigs.

[Maninacan]

6. Solar

No moving parts! If i can do it anyone can.

[Prairie_Seagull]

7. Lets say for the sake of argument that

the CLIMATE CATASTROPHE is a 4 alarm fire as things stand right now. We need all (including the best scientists and engineers) thinking of solutions. If that comes with a big payday then so be it. This is not a time to pinch pennies.

It's a 4 alarm fire, on the planet.

[Sogo]

8. Really inspiring!

nt.

[JT45242]

9. Was hopeful about this until I looked beyond the video to who is backing it ...Peter Thiel and other trump humping nazis

Per the Oregonian https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2026/05/portland-based-ocean-energy-startup-gets-140-million-investment-from-billionaire-backers.html

The funding round, which will support continued development of prototype devices and development of a pilot manufacturing facility in Vancouver, values the company at $1 billion. It was led by billionaire Peter Thiel and includes a number of other prominent investors such as John Doerr, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, and Paypal co-founder Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures.

And it goes from cheap energy for everyone to data centers for oligarchs.

'So depressing to think that this apartheid pushing dickhead is behind this.

[ihaveaquestion]

14. That is concerning... Hopefully the investment is only tied to making money and not ideological. nt

[progressoid]

20. Hmm

Kind of a mixed bag of bad and good and sort of bad investors.

[Zackzzzz]

10. Forgive me please, It may be I don't understand the process.

But do we have to worry about the curious fish that live in the ocean
being sucked up and pulverized?

[ihaveaquestion]

15. I'm sure they would have thought of that.

The video showed a clip of the interior of the sphere working and no fish were there.

[Pluvious]

27. My guess would be...

That the funnel mouth would have a screen, as the expelled water would clog up the turbines if there was fish in the mix

[moreland01]

11. Dang! I was really hoping to see

it actually sending energy back to terra firma. They offered 2 ideas for actually transmitting the energy back to humans who live on land, but they didn't get that far yet in their development of the project. I wonder how far out into the future this is. So amazing. It must be so exciting for these engineers.

[mitch96]

12. Ok what am I missing here, I went to their website and did a google search. I cannot find out how they

move the electrical energy produced by the device to shore...One is mentioning using it as a device to power on board data centers. Hummmm

I always thought it would be neat to use tidal energy to power turbines...LIke the Bay of Fundy
The bay water rises and falls oveer 50 feet twice per day..
Dat's a lot of liquid...
m

[ihaveaquestion]

17. They didn't talk about that. Presumably it would be via underwater powerlines, but IDK. nt

[mitch96]

21. The devil is in the details, eh? Great idea though...nt

[hunter]

24. Dat's a lot of environmental destruction too.

Some of the most environmentally destructive proposals come from people who call themselves "environmentalists."

[thought crime]

25. No energy transmission

An alternative to direct transmission is to use the "original" energy to produce hydrogen. The sustainable clean energy Nirvana includes a Hydrogen Economy where renewable energy supplies a hydrogen market. Hydrogen can be used to power transport devices (trains, planes and automobiles).

The best use of this power at sea? “Clean fuels and compute,” explains Garth. For fuels, Panthalassa can make clean hydrogen that ships back to shore on autonomous collection vessels. For computing, the ocean provides an ideal cooling solution, eliminating one of the major costs of operating data centers. Compute hardware sits on board the device, and AI workloads are performed via LEO satellite. The simple design of the nodes means that manufacturing can scale fast: fast enough to provide an alternative to land-based data centers.

https://gigascale.com/profiles/panthalassa-harnessing-ocean-power/

[BeneteauBum]

19. The ocean is a tough environment

Seems to be a good idea if the maintenance costs can be kept low.

Peace ☮️

[thought crime]

26. That was my first thought, too.

The devices are made of steel and steel rusts. But my personal bias is that anything that floats is good. Although I'm not so sure about cruise ships.

[flvegan]

22. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but

when I see the folks involved, I don't see any sort of altruism or human benefit. What I see is a way to provide continuous power and data for AI/data centers, even if things go...wrong (lets use that word) in the home country. The same people who are building off-grid, self sustained panacea islands, man made or otherwise, and buying self sustaining ocean-going ships, airplanes, whatever to get out and stay out of dodge for however long, are simply making sure they can continue to make their money uninterrupted via this new ocean bound solution.

And I don't believe for a minute, that all that bobbing, pressure, intake is NOT going to kill every single thing it comes into contact with. It'll have a nice, strong filter to keep anything that's not seawater out. It won't prejudice between seaweed, debris or ocean life. They don't care.

[hunter]

23. No numbers.

There's probably a reason for that.

I doubt Peter Thiel even gives a shit if this works or not, or what the environmental impacts are. It's just something he can point to while he and the other tech bros are promoting their filthy gas powered data centers.

Don't be fooled by these guys.

[OKIsItJustMe]

29. Thank you for posting this.

As the video suggests, there have been numerous schemes for harvesting wave energy for centuries. I believe this is the most elegant I’ve seen.

I have my questions, like "how much electricity does one buoy generate?" "Do you exclude sea life from the mechanism?” (and so on) However, so far, it looks promising.

[Pluvious]

30. I'm always happy to share...

And sometimes the feedback from others includes its own rewards

For example, I didn't know who was behind the investment of this project.
Which probably explains why there's a dearth of hard data being released.

My friend shared this comment:

I remember reading a long while back that there are so many engineers out there that have been dying to work on solutions for alternative energy, but couldn't find work due to the chokehold the fossil fuel industry has on innovation. It's good to see that they're finally able to use their talent and intelligence to find these desperately needed solutions!

Cheers friend

[OKIsItJustMe]

31. Yes, indeed, "a dearth."

They are funded by “Venture Capital”:
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/544747-24#overview

Notably, Peter Thiel:
https://www.esgtoday.com/peter-thiel-leads-140-million-capital-raise-for-panthalassa-to-power-ai-computing-using-ocean-waves/

Peter Thiel Leads $140 Million Capital Raise for Panthalassa to Power AI Computing Using Ocean Waves
Mark Segal May 5, 2026

Clean energy and ocean technology company Panthalassa announced that it has raised $140 million in a Series B funding round led by Paypal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with proceeds from the financing aimed at advancing its technology to power AI computing using zero emissions energy generated by ocean waves.

According to Panthalassa, the new financing comes as terrestrial data centers face mounting constraints with surging demand for electricity and computing, including limited grid capacity, cooling water scarcity, supply chain bottlenecks, permitting delays, and impacts on local communities and infrastructure.

Thiel said:

“The future demands more compute than we can imagine. Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”

Founded in 2016, Portland, Oregon-based Panthalassa has developed technology to power AI computing using ocean waves. The company’s produces nodes that capture wave energy and use it to generate clean electricity and run AI computing onboard, with data transmitted by low-Earth-orbit satellites. The nodes operate in the distant ocean and use the energy directly onboard to power AI chips, rather than transmitting the energy back to terrestrial grids. The location of the nodes also solves a key challenge for AI infrastructure, with the surrounding ocean provides free supercooling as well.

Garth Sheldon-Coulson, Co-Founder and CEO of Panthalassa, said:

“There are three sources of energy on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear, and the open ocean. We’ve built a technology platform that operates in the planet’s most energy-dense wave regions, far from shore, and turns that resource into reliable clean power. We’re now ready to build factories, deploy fleets, and provide a sustainable new source of energy for humanity.”

…