About 2 billion people, or about one quarter of the world's population, live within 100 km of the coast. So wave power could be a significant source of electricity. Because it can be attached to existing structures such as piers and harbours, it would be cheap. Most likely not that useful for large cities (they wouldn't have a long enough coastline) it would be a handy source of electricity for smaller coastal communities. However, because it would be quite uncorrelated to solar, and pro'bly not that correlated to wind (waves can be driven by storms hundreds of kilometres away), adding electricity from wave power to a grid would reduce the variability of the grid. Output from distributed wave-power facilities along a continental coastline would produce output with a baseload profile, night and day, winter and summer.
Here is the website of Ecowave, which is pushing this technology, and the video below gives you a good idea of how it works.
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