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I'm writing about renewable energy sources and I'm having a bit of trouble with this sentence:

A relatively immature, yet promising source are the ocean waves, which are a ceaseless discharge of energy directly on the shoreline.

Some grammar check services say that I should write:

A relatively immature, yet promising source is the ocean waves, which are a ceaseless discharge of energy directly on the shoreline.

I think can understand why this is correct, since "the source" is singular, i should use "is". But it seems a bit weird to use "is" when writing about "the waves". What is the correct form?

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  • You might want to replace words immature and discharge with more felicitous ones. Nevertheless, we don't do proofreading here.
    – user3395
    Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 16:33
  • What do you mean by felicitous? Could you please give an example? And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ask for proofreading.
    – Phelype Oleinik
    Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 16:49
  • I mean that they don't sound very good in this context. And don't worry. By the way, it's always a good thing to wait a day or two before accepting an answer, because when other people see a question already has an accepted answer, they're less likely to try to answer it themselves. (:
    – user3395
    Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 16:58

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The verb must coordinate with the (singular) subject:

A ... source is the ... waves...

You could rewrite it with a (plural) subject:

The ... waves are a ... source...

Possibly a duplicate of Subject-Verb Agreement

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