"What's your passion?" a stranger asked Inna Braverman at a pool party.

To his astonishment, her passion was not just obscure, he shared it. "Wave energy," she said.

It turned out they'd both been noodling about in the scientific literature for clues on how to catch the power of ocean waves for electricity in an eco-friendly and inexpensive way. Except she'd given up, because "I was not an engineer and I didn't have the money and I didn't have the contacts", Ms Braverman said.

But that poolside conversation with David Leb, a businessman with multinational interests, solved two out of three problems. In partnership and with hired engineers they came up with a technology that converts wave power to electricity with floaters attached to onshore structures such as breakwaters or jetties. It's taking off for their Israeli company Eco Wave Power, with projects in Gibraltar, Mexico, Chile and China.

Ms Braverman is hoping Australia will be next. If so, our coastline could soon be transformed by wave converters hanging off breakwaters, jetties, wharves and piers, alongside the rods and legs of hopeful fishermen.

"Australia is definitely an amazing market for wave energy. We have been looking at it for quite a long time. You have great waves for that", said Ms Braverman, who was in Sydney with the largest-ever delegation of Israeli companies accompanying Benjamin Netanyahu on the first visit to Australia by an incumbent Israeli prime minister.

Ms Braverman was born in Ukraine in the fallout zone within two weeks of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. As a baby she nearly died of a seizure due to chronic respiratory illness caused by the meltdown; she was saved by mouth to mouth resuscitation from her mother. To her, that makes the quest for safe, renewable energy "personal". "All my life kind of accidentally led me to this field," she said.

In 2012 a CSIRO report predicted that by 2050, wave energy could contribute up to 11 per cent of Australia's electricity, enough to power a city the size of Melbourne. Strong winds from the Southern Ocean generate a "large consistent swell" and "ideal conditions for wave energy production". Australia is "fortunate enough to have much of the world's best resource along its southern coastlines", the CSIRO said.

So far though, it's been a lot of potential, and a bit of disaster. Despite being abundant, renewable and emission-free, wave energy has failed to prove its commercial viability long term. That's due to its expense and a paradoxical problem: ocean waves have so much energy that the devices designed to harness it have been repeatedly dashed on them.

Eco Wave Power claims advantage in having all its infrastructure onshore. That means shorter transmission distances and none of the expensive complications that come with working in the open ocean. "We just cut out every large cost that was involved," she said. "Our engineer just walks on the break water – there are no cranes, no ships and no divers." The company claims construction costs of $1 million per megawatt of electricity, which Ms Braverman said was as little as one-hundredth the costs incurred by competitors.

The company has embarked on a $US6 million capital raising round with the Australian firm Redfield Asset Management secured as lead investor. It is considering listing on the Australian Stock Exchange, Ms Braverman said.

The ASX-listed Carnegie Clean Energy has been testing a one megawatt capacity prototype plant off Garden Island, 50 kilometres from Perth, where giant submerged buoys tethered to the ocean floor supplied power to the nearby naval base. The company has invested $140 million in the technology over 10 years. "At the moment, we are expensive because we are brand new," chief executive Michael Ottaviano was recently reported as saying in The Straits Times. "Like every power technology, the way to get cheap is to go big quickly."

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, ocean energy could produce between 20,000 and 80,000 terawatt hours per year, "which is 100 per cent to 400 per cent of current global demand for electricity". But only a handful of the estimated 100-plus wave power pilot projects around the world are operational.

In 2010 a world-first floating converter built by Australian company Oceanlinx broke free of its moorings 150 metres off the coast of Port Kembla in NSW and was wrecked on the shore. In 2014, a $7 million prototype the company was preparing to test off the coast of South Australia sank on the way to the test site, sending it into receivership, although the Oceanlinx name lives on reportedly following the sale of its intellectual property to a Hong Kong company.

A high-profile project by the Australian arm of US-based Ocean Power Technologies to build the world's biggest trial wave farm off Portland, Victoria, was abandoned in 2014. The company declared it no longer viable and returned a $66 million grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Scottish company Pelamis Wave Power developed a giant snake-like wave energy machine which was first to generate power into the British grid in 2004, but the company ran out of funds and went into administration in 2014.

According to Ms Braverman, Eco Wave Power is the only wave company currently generating for the grid in Europe, through a power purchasing agreement with the government of Gibraltar. The initial converters with a total capacity of 100 kilowatts sit on a former World War II ammunition jetty. When the project is completed, the site will generate five megawatts, or 15 per cent of Gibraltar's electricity consumption.