Swedish wave energy developer CorPower Ocean has secured €40 million in European Union funding for VianaWave, a 10 MW wave energy farm planned for installation off the coast of Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal. The project, which would deploy an array of CorPower’s C4 wave energy converters in the Atlantic waters that have already hosted the company’s successful single-device demonstration at Aguçadoura, represents the largest wave energy deployment in European history and a defining moment for the Nordic-Iberian ocean energy corridor.
CorPower Ocean’s journey to this milestone began with a fundamental rethinking of how to extract energy from ocean waves. Founded in Stockholm in 2012 as a spin-off from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the company developed a wave energy converter inspired by the mechanics of the human heart’s pumping system. The C4 device uses a buoy tethered to the seabed, with a phase-control technology that amplifies the natural oscillation of the buoy in response to wave motion—dramatically increasing energy capture per unit of size compared to earlier wave energy designs. The technology has been developed over more than a decade through progressively larger prototypes, culminating in the deployment of a full-scale C4 device at Aguçadoura in 2024.
Portugal was the obvious choice for proving this technology at scale, and Aguçadoura in particular carries symbolic weight. The site, located approximately 100 kilometres north of Porto, was where the world’s first commercial wave energy project—the Pelamis Wave Power project—was briefly operational in 2008 before the company’s financial collapse. Nearly two decades later, CorPower’s presence at the same stretch of Atlantic coastline represents both the resilience of the wave energy sector and the maturation of the underlying technology. Portugal’s Atlantic-facing western coast offers some of Europe’s most consistent and energetic wave resources, with annual mean wave power densities of 25–40 kW per metre of wave front—conditions that are significantly more favourable than the North Sea or Baltic locations available to Nordic developers.
The VianaWave project’s €40 million EU Innovation Fund grant reflects Brussels’ growing recognition that wave energy is approaching commercial viability after decades of experimental development. The project will deploy multiple C4 devices in an array configuration, connected to the Portuguese grid via subsea cables. Operations are targeted for 2028–2029, with an estimated project lifetime of 25 years. When fully operational, the 10 MW farm will generate enough electricity to power approximately 12,000 Portuguese households and will serve as a commercial reference project for wave energy deployment globally.
The strategic significance for Portugal extends beyond the electricity generated. Viana do Castelo has been building a marine energy ecosystem for several years, anchored by the West Sea shipyard that has already collaborated with Norwegian electric cruise company Northern Xplorer on zero-emission vessel construction. The VianaWave project will create hundreds of local jobs during construction and require ongoing operations and maintenance staff, establishing a wave energy service industry in a region that has historically depended on fishing and traditional shipbuilding. Portugal’s national maritime strategy explicitly identifies marine renewable energy as a priority sector, and the country’s exclusive economic zone—the third largest in the EU—provides vast potential deployment areas for future wave and tidal projects.
For Nordic investors and energy companies, CorPower’s Portuguese operations open a new asset class in the renewable energy portfolio. Wave energy has different generation characteristics from solar and wind: it produces power around the clock and tends to peak in winter months when solar output is lowest, making it a natural complement to Portugal’s dominant solar and wind capacity. This complementarity is increasingly valuable as Portugal pushes beyond 80% renewable electricity penetration and faces the challenge of managing intermittency across seasons. Nordic institutional investors, including pension funds and sovereign wealth vehicles that have been major backers of European offshore wind, are watching wave energy’s cost trajectory as it follows a similar commercialisation path to offshore wind in the early 2010s.
CorPower’s choice of Portugal over Nordic waters is instructive. While Sweden and Norway have excellent marine energy resources, particularly along the Norwegian coast, the regulatory and permitting environment for ocean energy is more advanced in Portugal. The country’s dedicated ocean energy test zone at Aguçadoura, managed by WavEC Offshore Renewables, provides streamlined permitting, grid connection, and environmental monitoring infrastructure that significantly reduces development timelines. Portugal’s proactive approach—creating enabling infrastructure before commercial demand arrives—mirrors the strategy it used to attract data centre investment at Sines and is now paying dividends in marine energy.
The broader Nordic-Iberian energy corridor now spans an extraordinary range of technologies: Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ €2.8 billion Sines investment, Stegra’s planned green steel plant, Eurowind Energy and Nordic Solar’s solar developments in Aveiro and Alentejo, Boliden’s 49 MWp solar installation at Castro Verde, and now CorPower’s wave energy farm off Viana do Castelo. Portuguese renewable energy and Nordic capital and technology are converging at scale, creating an integrated clean energy supply chain that stretches from the Atlantic seabed to industrial hydrogen production. CorPower’s VianaWave project adds the final missing piece: ocean energy. If it performs as designed, the template for Nordic-financed, Portuguese-hosted wave energy farms could be replicated along the Atlantic coast from the Algarve to Galicia, unlocking what the European Commission has estimated could be 100 GW of European wave energy capacity by 2050.