Wave and Tidal Power Face a Hidden Test: Adding Up the Ocean's

Wave and tidal power are moving from prototypes toward commercial arrays, but a new international review says the sector is being tested by an assessment tool it hasn’t fully mastered: cumulative effects assessment (CEA). Led by researchers including Australia’s Elizabeth Fulton (CSIRO) and analysts from the U.S. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the study was conducted under the International Energy Agency’s Ocean Energy Systems programme. It screened 926 documents and kept 145 published since 2007. The report argues regulators often measure environmental impacts project-by-project—noise, electromagnetic fields, collision risk—without stacking those effects across sectors and time, risking unintended, hard-to-predict outcomes.