EPOS-lite, a design concept for a tablet that serves as both a menu and wireless payment device. It even wirelessly recharges itself as you place it on the tabletop.

While it's not clear exactly how this works, the best scenario would be to give each diner an EPOS-lite, they select their meals from the menu, and then their choices are displayed on a screen in front of the chef. When dinner's done, each person can enter payment info, just like buying something online. No more strangers carrying your credit card back and forth in that goofy payment ritual that takes your credit card out of your sight with its number ending up who-knows-where.

A touchscreen might get a bit smudged at a rib restaurant, but that could be worked out with voice recognition. Imagine bypassing wait staff altogether, being served by robots (or a gravity-powered rail system), and then paying online. It would be downright revolutionary.

World’s First Commercial Wave Energy Farm Goes Live

Earlier this week, Portugal debuted the world’s first commercial wave energy farm. Wave energy at the Agucadoura station is converted into electricity with the use of three red “sea-snakes”, or cylindrical wave energy converters, that are attached to the seabed off Portugal’s northern coast. Energy captured by the sea-snakes is carried to an undersea cable station, where it is then fed into the electrical grid.

The devices will generate 2.25 MW of electricity— enough to power 1,500 homes. Ultimately, the wave power station will expand to produce up to 21 MW of power.

Unfortunately, wave power is not price competitive in Portugal at the moment. The €9m project was only made possible by the country’s feed-in tariff, which requires utilities to buy renewable energy from a wide range of producers. However, proponents of the farm believe that wave energy could be cost-efficient within 15 years.

Agucadoura’s farm is a only a small part of Portugal’s renewable energy plans, which include both the world’s largest wind farm and the world’s largest solar farm. The country hopes to generate 60 percent of its total energy from renewables by 2020.

Ocean Buoys to Provide 10% of US Energy Requirements

With so much of our planet covered in the stuff, it is a surprise that water does not receive the attention that renewable technologies like wind and solar do. Nevertheless, with renewable energy being the catchphrase of many countries at the moment, advancements are being made towards a future where our oceans will provide us with electricity.

After two years, an oversized yellow buoy floating five miles off the southern tip of Long Beach Island has definitely proved its technology feasible. With the rise and fall of each wave, pistons slide up and down inside a cylinder within the buoy, generating electricity.

Though the little buoy doesn’t make much in the way of electricity, it makes enough to power its onboard systems, and the occasional message back home, to its manufacturer, Ocean Power Technologies of Pennington, N.J. Co-founder of OPT George W. Taylor, a 74-year-old engineer, grew up a young surfer in Australia (the best place to be a young surfer) and knew all about the power of the ocean.

Taylor looks at his one buoy as the predecessor for large farms of buoys, all generating electricity across the planet, on coasts with much larger waves than New Jersey. Indeed, ocean energy is “probably the last of the large natural resources not yet investigated for producing electricity in the United States,” according to a report from the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.

Roger Bedard, the EPR institute’s ocean energy expert, believes that the potential for hydro electricity generation is “significant.” In fact, he believes it could generate up to 10% of America’s power needs, accounting all current inefficiencies and practicalities. Perhaps, in the future, that 10% could grow as power grids change and adapt to handle the sometimes irregular influx of power generated from wind, solar and water.

Europe is already well ahead of the US in terms of ocean technology. Only recently did a wave farm begin operations in Portugal, and plans are popping up all across the UK – including off the western coasts – to make use of the violent North Atlantic.