"FERC's permits are granted on the basis of ‘first in time, first right,' kind of like mining claims," said Rob Bovett, an attorney with Oregon's Lincoln County. "So you had this kind of feeding frenzy up and down the coast, with people drawing boxes in the ocean."

"We want people to come to us beforehand and ask us where to site these things," Bovett said. "We want to comprehensively plan for this stuff." The County filed an application with FERC for the waters off its coast in 2006, but FERC turned it down, on the ground that the County asked for too broad an area. In California, Sonoma County also applied for a preliminary permit for its coastal waters, and was also denied, but Douglas and Tillamook Counties in Oregon were granted permits for some of their waters.

Because some of the most promising sites for wave power installations are also the best areas for fishing, this rush to claim territory raised an outcry, especially from fishermen who were alarmed by the speed with which the permits were granted and feared that they would be excluded from fishing grounds.

"People don't know where or when they'll be able to weigh in," said Humboldt County Supervisor Jimmy Smith, who is also a commercial fisherman. "What we've asked is for them [FERC] to slow down." In California as in Oregon, local governments and community groups have said they want companies to work with them to choose the best sites for testing and site construction; at the least, they want a clear regulatory process. In meetings, letters to the editor, and newspaper articles, people worried: Would wave energy projects be a clean energy boon, or would they cause harm to local economies and ocean resources?

Baby Steps toward Great Benefits
At this point, wave power development is about where wind power was 15 years ago, according to Annette von Jouanne, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Oregon State University (OSU) and director of OSU's Wallace Energy Systems and Renewables Facility, a leading wave energy research institution. Much testing will be required to determine which technologies are the most efficient for a particular location and what effects they might have on the environment.

But before the new industry can become technologically reliable and economically competitive, upfront investment will be needed. Countries leading the way, including Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, provide public funding for research and incentives to help this emerging technology become more attractive to investors. In the United States, however, government subsidies have thus far gone mostly for fossil fuels. A measure to support alternatives was attached to the $700-billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act signed by President Bush on October 8. It extended production tax credits for wind energy, authorized $800 million in bonds for varied alternative energy production, and established a tax credit for marine and hydrokinetic energy generation projects with a minimum capacity of 150 kilowatts if they are put into production by 2011.

The first significant wave power generator was invented by Stephen Salter at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s, during the earlier oil crisis, but the project lost its funding before he was able to test his "Salter's Duck" at sea. Since then, many different types of wave power systems have been developed. Some are designed to be fixed to the shoreline, a breakwater, to the seabed in shallow water, or to an offshore platform such as an oil rig; others are designed to float, moored near the shore or farther offshore.

The Pelamis Wave Energy Converter, used in the Aguçadoura wave farm three miles off Portugal's coast, is a semi-submerged, articulated tube connected by hinged joints and moored to the seafloor by cables. As the joints move with the waves, they activate hydraulic pumps that power generators to produce electricity that is transported to shore through a submarine cable and fed directly into the national distribution grid. Three tubes have been installed thus far, at a cost of $13 million, capable of generating up to 2.25 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 1,500 Portuguese homes. (Average household energy consumption varies widely from country to country, and even within the same country, depending on climate and other factors. In Portugal, the household average for 2005 was 3,473 kilowatt hours.) Within the next few years, 25 more tubes are to be added, raising the yield to up to 21 megawatts. The Aguçadoura system was built by the Scottish company Pelamis in partnership with a consortium led by the Portuguese utility Energias de Portugal.