Dynamic Tidal Power
Description
Dynamic Tidal Power (DTP): New Tides for New Generations:
A new concept for renewable energy from the North Sea.
If you were chilling on the beach in the scorching hot summer of 2018, gazing across the languid sea at a blurry point on the horizon, you might have casually come up with the idea that at the same time in that water, within the Netherlands' Exclusive Economic Zone, some 30 Gigawatts of electrical power passes unused. This power is, hidden from the unarmed eye, in the tide: 60 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year, half of the current total Dutch E-consumption.
Realising this idea does require something tangible: an out-sized maritime infrastructure. Its concept is based on our national hydraulic engineering tradition: the Afsluitdijk and the Delta Works. But with a special twist: turbine-passage caissons.
Irs. Kees Hulsbergen and Rob Steijn, coastal morphologists at the then Waterloopkundig Laboratorium (since 10 years Deltares), came across this idea in 1996. That was too soon. At least for 'The Hague', dozing off in the now rapidly deflating beanbag of a giant gas bubble.
What to do? We went in search of a more interesting hearing for us: China. This suspicion proved correct. This may have something to do with the circumstance that China is controlled by a college of nine people, of whom at the time (in 2006) no fewer than five were engineers, four of whom trained as Hydropower engineers. Surely that talks differently to lawyers and history scholars.
Our DTP cooperation with China lasted from 2007 to 2015, ending with a preliminary 'Chinese business case' of a 100-km-long DTP dam in the South China Sea. Potential capacity 22 GW, as big as that of the Three Gorges Dam, the most powerful hydropower dam in the world. For a video on DTP:
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The Paris Agreement (late 2015) to curb the overheating of the Earth in time was finally an alarm signal for The Hague too. We want the NL government to quickly launch a serious investigation into the potential of DTP for the NL to meet its stated goals.
Speaker(s)
ir. K ( Kees) Hulsbergen
(CEO, Offering Water Energy Revolution)
Location
Southpark, Europalaan 100, 3506 KS Utrecht
Southpark Utrecht
Organiser
Utrecht region
Name and contact details for information
Jaap Vogelaar
