A string of three red steel tubes, each the size of a railway carriage, lies low in the water off the northern coast of Portugal. As the snub-nosed apparatus rises and dips in the Atlantic waves, it becomes immediately clear why this pioneering energy technology is called Pelamis after a mythical giant sea snake. Later this year, these wave energy converters, developed over many years of testing by Edinburgh-based Pelamis Wave Power, will be pumping electricity into Portugal's national grid, making it the first country in the world to harness wave energy on a commercial basis. "Portugal has the opportunity to do for wave power what Denmark has done for wind energy," says Ian Sharpe of Australia's Babcock & Brown, the leading partner in the project through Enersis, its Portuguese renewable energy company. In two years, 23 of these converters, moored to the seabed about seven kilometres off the coast south of Porto, should be in operation, with a total capacity of 22.5MW. But Enersis has its sights on a more ambitious project involving an investment of up to