These days, surf parks are like buses: miss one, and another one will come along soon enough. Last week it was Sydney’s turn. Owen Wright was the highest-profile surfer to test the new facility in Sydney Olympic Park. Using Wavegarden technology, and run by UrbnSurf, which opened Australia’s first surf park in Melbourne in 2020, the pool will be open to the public starting May 13.
It is one of 17 wave parks either open or due to open in 2024, joining six in the U.S., two in the Middle East, five in Europe and three in South America. With dozens more in development, we are finally seeing the nascent industry burst into hard, concrete, commercial life.
No wonder then, that the various technologies behind these multi-million dollar facilities (Sydney’s was quoted as costing $A75 million) are fighting hard to gain the edge. We recently covered the patent war between American Wave Machines (AWM) and Endless Surf. AWM is the company behind the PerfectSwell pools at Boa Vista Village in São Paulo, Waco Surf in Texas, and Surf Stadium in Japan.
Endless Surf is a new technology and has development projects in the works, including in Houston, Coachella Valley, Australia’s Gold Coast, Lisbon, and Saudi Arabia. The O2 SurfTown MUC in Munich will be the brand’s first to open in 2024.
Both of these companies, as well as Tom Lochtefeld’s Loch Tech, use pneumatic technology. That’s where air chambers, around 20-feet wide, are fired in unique sequences, the air moving the water to produce up to 180 waves per hour.
Wavegarden Cove technology uses an electro-mechanical system to move panels in modules that cause the water particles to move similarly to ocean waves. Surf Ranch uses a hydrofoil generator to create its surf. The outlier in terms of tech is Surf Lakes, which uses a Central Wave Device (CWD) or a “plunger” to displace water and create concentric swell lines.
The real battle in the surf park sector might just be which of these types of technology will end up as superior. The analogy, all be it a dated one, might be the video format wars of the late ’70s. Sony patented its Betamax technology for its new video cassettes. Sony’s main competitor, JVC, had VHS, which while of poor quality, was cheaper and without a patent could be shared. VHS won the battle, and all the market share for the next 30 years, until CDs and then digital tech made them all irrelevant. Kids, if all that sounds like absolute nonsense, go ask your parents to show you a VHS tape.
At this relatively early stage in the surf park game, whoever wins the technology war, might just go on to be the dominant force. It’s probably the reason why the Wavegarden crew came out swinging this week, with a campaign titled “Fighting Fake News in the Surf Park Sector.”
“Wavegarden’s data is extracted from full-scale operating facilities, not theoretical design plans and is compiled by engineers, not salesmen,” said a punchy Josema Odriozola, Founder and CEO of Wavegarden, based in the Spanish Basque Country. “We aim to develop trust and fair competition in the surf park sector by publishing only precise data.”
Currently the market leader with eight parks in operation and six further under construction, (with dozens more in development) he has a point that he’s working off real, commercial data. Each Wavegarden facility averages more than 200,000 visitors per year, rivaling the Superbank in numbers.
Odriozola believed that his stated goal of transparency has been compromised by rumors regarding the Wavegarden technology, although he doesn’t say exactly who, or where.
Perhaps his biggest claim was that on a like-for-like basis, pneumatic technology requires 10 times more energy to create these waves than with Wavegarden technology.
While he has research based on the Wavegarden parks, the emerging market really has no specific official standards, nor any classification body to standardize such claims. Once you enter wave size, frequency, intensity, length of ride, and more, it’s often difficult to get an apples-to-apples comparison
Wavegarden, however, does publish on its site as having 350 kilowatt-hour average energy consumption per surf session (one hour). It might be a starting point for comparison, though their competitors, as yet, haven’t published any figures.
Water consumption is another key component, and cost in the parks. Again comparing the technologies is difficult with a lack of data. The volume of water needed in a surfing lagoon depends on the number, size and length of waves that you want to deliver. In its campaign, Wavegarden said its Cove lagoons are the most efficient in the world in terms of the volume of water used versus the number, size, and length of waves provided.
One comparison that can be made, however, is the water consumed by surf parks compared to golf courses. This recently came to the fore when the Coral Mountain Surf Park proposal in the Coachella Valley, which was due to use Kelly Slater’s technology, was eventually rejected by the local government based on its water use.
Yet Jess Ponting, considered the leading academic and consultant in sustainable surf tourism, found that on average, one golf course in the Coachella Valley consumes the same amount of water as 92 Palm Springs Surf Clubs, 17.5 Endless Summer 34s, 16.4 Wavegarden Coves, or seven Coral Mountain KSWaveCo Lagoons.
The irony was the surf park was replaced by yet another golf course, that will use significantly more water than the surf park would have. Ponting says that in the Coachella Valley, each hole uses 15.38 million gallons of water.
But that is a digression. Surfers aren’t so much interested in kilowatts per hour, or gallons per wave, but the surfing experience of each wave park. Currently, there isn’t a whole lot of choice, but that soon will be about to change as more and more come into existence.
Whether you are in Sao Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo or Texas, you may have the choice between different technologies you want to surf. Aspects like energy and water, maintenance and reliability will affect the price, which might be major determinants of which technology comes out on top.
The differing technologies will be battling it out, not exactly for our hearts and minds, but for our hard-earned coin and our 15 waves per hour. Watch this space.
