Pelamis Sea

Russell Davies held a competition to rename the North Sea and a French guy working as a planner in London has won - with the name Pelamis Sea.

I'd never heard of the Pelamis wave generator, now I have and it sounds really cool:

"The Pelamis prototype has been operating at the Orkney test centre since August 2004. No major issues of durability or corrosion were found during the staged test programme over the year. The US Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) have given it a positive independent assessment, considering that it's the closest to commercial delivery of current wave energy machines.

...Each Pelamis 'snake' is made of four segments, hinged both horizontally and vertically, to permit sideways and up-and-down movement. Each segment in the P-750 will be similar in size and length to a train carriage. When it's bent and twisted by the waves, pistons force oil through hydraulic chambers connected via valves to give a smoothed flow that drives a dynamo generator.

The Pelamis snake is moored to keep it head-on into the waves. Survivability is vital so the design allows Pelamis to dive through storm waves that are ten times higher than the average waves (100 times more power). Efficiency is quite low, under 10%, but that is not so important when the waves off Atlantic facing coasts carry some 60kW per metre."