This article was originally published by Wendy Chen on Climate and Capital Media.
What could be a more elegant solution than capturing the perpetual motion of the sea to provide endless clean electricity?
Wave energy has benefited from decades of academic and laboratory research, which has laid much of the sector’s technical foundation. Yet, like many promising technologies, it has to overcome the next set of challenges to scale commercially — high costs, operational complexities, and long-term durability in real-world conditions.
This is where the know-how of a legacy industry plays an important role. Which is why Western Australian startup WaveX is tapping the hard-won lessons of the oil and gas industry to generate renewable energy from the sea.
Oil and gas companies have been built by large technical teams operating in tough environments, with a high risk of engineering failure and financial fallout.
Long defined by its old-school resource economy, the state of Western Australia supplies roughly 38% of global iron ore and 12% of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG). Companies in these industries have been built by large technical teams operating in tough environments — from the Pilbara’s extreme heat and remoteness to offshore gas facilities exposed to cyclones — with a high risk of engineering failure and financial fallout. This deep field experience is now playing a role in nudging clean-energy technologies to commercial deployment,
WaveX is a wave-energy company founded in 2023 by offshore oil and gas veteran Simon Renwick, who is trained in hydrodynamic engineering. Renwick spent more than two decades working on offshore LNG structures before starting his own company to generate renewable energy from the sea’s motion. He assembled a team of former oil and gas engineers with experience designing systems that interact dynamically with waves over long operational lifetimes, often in extreme conditions.
Amal Jose Arackal, Tim Green, Simon Renwick and Graham Prentice (from left), of the WaveX team. Credit: CERI (www.ceri.org.au).
As Renwick explains: “Oil and gas companies learned this the hard way: underwater moving parts are expensive to maintain and extremely difficult to fix when they fail. We designed the WaveX system by stripping that complexity out entirely. When I shared the approach with offshore engineers, everyone agreed — this is how you’d build it if you wanted it to last.”
WaveX’s design approach emerged from years spent working with large offshore structures in Western Australia’s harsh wave environments. The result is a fully floating design that is much more universal and adaptable with no underwater mechanical or electrical parts, which allows WaveX to fill the gaps left by the energy intermittency of wind and solar.
The company recently secured an A$3.5 million (US $2.5 million) seed round, with a sizable portion from a retail investor group of oil and gas professionals, alongside a government grant. That funding will support its first large-scale pilot deployment at the University of Western Australia’s M4 wave-energy testing site near Albany, Australia where the Southern Ocean provides some of the world’s strongest currents and wave motion. Albany’s Historic Whaling Station — a popular local museum — also signed an MOU with WaveX to progress a Power Purchase Agreement to offtake the electricity generated from this project.
Jen Bane, CEO of Discovery Bay (trading as Albany’s Historic Whaling Station), and Simon Renwick upon signing an MOU to progress a PPA to offtake energy generation from the Albany project. Credit: WaveX.
The LNG industry, like many legacy industries, has significant baggage in climate terms. But WaveX illustrates how the operational knowledge from these industries can be repurposed for the energy transition. The field-driven industry engineering reflects decades of cost discipline, scalability constraints, and risk management — attributes that become essential once clean energy enters the real world.
Shipping dynasties navigating toward green operations
The convergence between legacy industry leaders and the emerging innovation landscape seen in Western Australia is also playing out across the maritime sector in Asia and Europe. In December 2025, OCTAVE Capital, the impact investment arm of Tsao Pao Chee (TPC), led a $44 million investment round in bound4blue, a Spanish maritime technology company developing automated wind-assisted propulsion systems for shipping companies. TPC is a Singapore-based, fourth-generation family enterprise with origins in shipping and logistics dating back to the late 1800s in China.
Wind-assisted propulsion systems (WAPS) are attracting growing interest in shipping because they work with existing vessels rather than against them.
Wind-assisted propulsion systems (WAPS) are attracting growing interest in shipping because they work with existing vessels rather than against them. By generating aerodynamic lift from the wind, WAPS reduce engine load, fuel burn, and emissions without requiring a change in fuel type or propulsion architecture.
What distinguishes this investment is the overwhelming participation of shipping industry insiders themselves. The round also included participation from the family office of Norwegian shipping company Odfjell, as well as Motion Ventures, a Singapore-based venture fund backed by a network of more than 80 shipping executives. The composition of the investor group reflects a growing willingness among industry operators to back technologies that offer both climate-friendly solutions and significant operational advantages.
“As an impact fund manager backed by a purpose-led family business with deep roots in the global maritime industry, we see a real opportunity to help move decarbonization in a sector that’s ready for change,” says May Liew, CEO of OCTAVE Capital. “Our shipping teams at IMC see strong potential in the technology to deliver real fuel savings alongside emissions reductions.”
In the most climate-forward jurisdictions… regulation or tax incentives increasingly encourage large companies to invest in, procure from, or partner with emerging technologies…
From lab breakthroughs to buildable systems
The next phase of the energy transition will be defined less by what works in theory and more by what holds up in practice. Universities, research institutions, and first-time founders continue to push the frontier of what is technically possible. But translating those breakthroughs into infrastructure that performs over decades requires a different kind of expertise: an understanding of how systems fail, how costs compound, and how assets behave once they leave controlled environments.
In the most climate-forward jurisdictions, such as the UK and Norway, regulation or tax incentives increasingly encourage large companies to invest in, procure from, or partner with emerging technologies — making innovation adoption a part of business operations rather than an act of corporate goodwill.
Scaling the energy transition will require more of this deliberate cross-pollination. That means lowering the barriers for experienced operators to become investors, partners, and builders of the next generation of clean energy systems, not just end-users or compliance actors. Capital, engineering, and operational know-how need to move together.
To be sure, collaboration is rarely frictionless. In practice, industry–startup partnerships often stall amid misaligned incentives, internal bureaucracy, and mismatched timelines, and legacy companies are frequently criticized for lacking ambition or urgency. What is clearer, however, is that the energy transition will hinge on who can build, finance, and operate systems that endure.