As they say in the Circus, "And now for something completely different!" According to this article from Reuters, Portugal is going to be the proud recipient of the world's first production power generation plant to use tidal power.

Ocean Power Delivery, a company based in Edinburgh, Scotland and owned partially by a Norwegian electric company, will be building the facility about 3 miles off of the coast of Portugal to deliver about 2.2MW of power.

The devices themselves, called the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter (animation available on the link) can generate about 250KW and are about 120M long and 3M wide. They float on top of the water and have a series of joints, though which high- pressure oil is pumped by the rocking motion to create electricity.

Looks cool.