Re-Purposing the Netherlands' Dike System For Power Generation

vikingpower writes "Built in reaction to a major flood that killed 1,800 in the '50s, the Dutch system of dikes, sluices, surge barriers, and dams has been dubbed 'one of the seven wonders of the modern world' by the American Society of Engineers. Now there are proposals to use the system differently, e.g. as tidal power plants, by punching holes in them. Any civil engineer's mouth will probably be watering when thinking of the mega-projects this could give rise to."

Comments

This is a Great Idea

[BJ_Covert_Action]

This is a great idea! All of the dykes I know are very powerful women indeed! Genious!

(Yeah, yeah, I know, bad taste, but c'mon someone had to go there.)

No, it's a lousy idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Salt water engineering is expensive and more bad jokes coming -
extracting energy from dykes with a low head is inefficient.

Get 10m or so height difference and it's all good, 1 or 2 m which is all this looks like holding is
just an expensive world of pain. The energy needed for maintenance (corrosion/weed/lifeform clearing)
will probably be more than is ever generated.

Great idea

[rve]

This is a great idea. Sure, it seems like a waste of all the resources and energy put into building those dikes and keeping that land dry, but the madness can't go on forever. Natural selection will eventually take care of a land based species that prefers to live below sea level.

The Netherlands are the most environmentally unfriendly country in the world. Do you have any idea how much water the country displaces? And how much fossil fuel is burned to fuel the pumps needed to keep the sea from flowing back. Giving this country back to the sea would cancel out decades of sea level rise. It would also save the more than 80 gigaton oil equivalent per year in energy that country uses. Inundating the place and turning the entire country into an alternative energy source seems like a nice way to give something back to mother nature.

Re:Great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent poster does have a point. The article itself even refers (quite vaguely) to the effects this system of dams, sluices, etc. is having on the environment. It's a severe disruption of how things *should* be, resulting in stagnating water, algae blooms, floods, and, in general, killing off the natural ecosystem inherent to lakes, seas and rivers.

Re:Great idea

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Too little too late sir, I say we nuke Belgium to a depth of fifteen meters and fill that in instead.

Who's with me?!

More seriously though, how would this work, wouldn't they need to pump the water out afterwards, or are they hoping for tidal flow forces to do that for them?

Re:Great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Laugh, great suggestion. My apartment is in a building that's about 4m below sea level, so that means I'd be able to kayak to work directly from the lounge room. Awesome!

Page 55 of the 2006 IEA "Key World Energy Statistics" shows that the per-capita energy use in the Netherlands is on different measures, somewhere between 0.5 and 0.75 of the USA's.

Re:Great idea

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

The world renowned Dutch sense of humour

The Dutch are renowned for many things, a sense of humour isn't one of them. Unless you were trying to be funny, in which case I stand corrected.

Re:Great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

More seriously though, how would this work, wouldn't they need to pump the water out afterwards, or are they hoping for tidal flow forces to do that for them?

As per TFA:

A hole in the Brouwersdam, for example, would allow for tides as high as 50 centimetres. The opening would make an ideal site for a tidal power plant, which is also being considered by the committee.

And this isn't exactly a new concept either, France has had one since 1966: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_Tidal_Power_Station
To be fair though, there's a 13 meter tide there instead of a mere 50 centimetres.

Re:Great idea

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

As per TFA:

TFA? TFA?? This is SLASHDOT!!

/kicks AC in the chest

Re:Great idea

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

And ten points for the rare and difficult to achieve double-whoosh on the backspin, the crowd goes wild.

Re:Great idea

[ArsenneLupin]

Too little too late sir, I say we nuke Belgium to a depth of fifteen meters and fill that in instead.

The article is about dykes, and you are calling for the Enola Gay?

Re:Great idea

[ColdWetDog]

Think about it for a second, windmills literally suck energy out of the wind - wind that goes places and does things and is absolutely critical for most ecosystems on the planet to survive. Now, there may be absolutely nothing wrong with them at all, but it seems like we've just been rushing to use them without looking into the potential consequences. Isn't that the exact same mistake we made with oil?

- I believe this has been looked at but a brief consultation with the Oracle didn't realize any obvious results. Perhaps I didn't feed it enough electrons.

- The gist of the argument for deciding that there is no possible (or no likely, depending on how you trust these sorts of back of the email type calculations) significant disruption of the global ecosphere is thus:

Wind turbines sit perhaps 30 - 100 meters above the ground.
- The trophosphere, or bottom of the atmosphere, contains most of the weather, water and likely energy. This goes up to around 10 km. The next layer, the stratosphere goes to about 50 km.
- Even if you took a significant swath of energy out of the 100 meters or so that a wind turbine straddles, that comprises and infinitesimal amount of total energy of the system.
- For those of you inclined to argue about butterflies flapping their wings and causing hurricanes, I would point out that the wind turbines may change things but that change is buried in the statistical noise.

Or some similar handwaving argument.

Re:Dear Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us that don't speak American there is no such word as dike - only dyke for both meanings.

Re:Dear Editor

[Paul Jakma]

The word is dyke in dutch (well, more or less) and in its closest english speaking neighbour.

Try learn about the rest of the world before making yourself sound like an myopic, "World Series" looking idiot.

Re:Dear Editor

[Paul Jakma]

Are you really unaware that there are variants of english out there other than US english?

This reminds me of a related idea..

[jcr]

Some years ago, I saw a news item on a proposal to flood the sahara by digging a canal through Libya, and powering pretty much all of North Africa and Southern Europe with electricity generated by turbines in the canals. As I recall, it was supposed to drop the world sea level by about a foot or so.

-jcr

Re:This reminds me of a related idea..

[MartinSchou]

The Earth has 361,132,000 km^2 of water.
The Sahara is over 9,000,000 km^2

So, if we want to drop the sea level by a foot, we need to siphon off 110,073.034 km^3. To do that, we need to lower the entire Sahara to 12.2 meters below sea level. Probably 12.5 meters to get the sea to fall that extra foot.

Good idea, but where exactly are we going to put those 110,000 km^3 of material? We can't dump it into the ocean for obvious reasons. Also, those 110,000 km^3 are just the stuff you need do dig away, once we've made the entire Sahara flat and given it a height of 0 meters.

Every meter of average height of the desert, adds another 9,000 km^3 of material to haul away.

To put that into perspective - if we build an equilateral square pyramid with a volume of 110,000 km^3, its surface area would be 77 km on each side (6,016 km^2) and would be 54,848 meters tall.

Sure, it might lower the sea level by a foot, and it would certainly keep a lot people employed for the foreseeable future, and I suppose a 54,848 meter tall pyramid on the equator would make for a great launch pad into space ... but at the same time I don't see that any government or company would ever want to sponsor this kind of project.

Oh, and just for kicks. Suppose we only wanted to move this mountain of material one meter. How much energy would be required? Assuming that instead of a mix of sand and bed rock it's actually water, we now have to move 1.1 × 10^17 kg 1 meter. This works out as 1.08 exa-joules. In 2008 the entire world used 474 exa joules. Even if we used all the the energy avaialble to us in 2008, we could only move this mass less than half a kilometer.

So ... in theory it might be possible to do this, but it's also theoretically possible to dig a tunnel all the way through the Earth. But the practicalities of both of these ideas are quite bitchy.

Re:This reminds me of a related idea..

[demonlapin]

I think what you heard of was the Qattara Depression, where hydro proposals depend on evaporation to move the water away.

Re:Dear Editor

[pjt33]

That may well be so, but last time I checked, Slashdot was published in English.

Speaking as an Englishman, I suggest you check again.

Re:Dear Editor

[dbIII]

It doesn't matter. After Reagan they stopped teaching US English in most places because Ebonics was cheaper :)
Having arguments about spelling here is a waste of time propagated by those that think the ultimate in English language studies is a spelling bee and have never gotten as far as reading anything old enough to have this stupid spelling obsession beaten out of them. It's not their fault since it's due to education cutbacks and self-study is difficult without time and a decent library.
Yes, it was a stupid typo and quite funny but we all knew what it really meant by the context.

Re:Dear Editor

[mpe]

Are you really unaware that in US English, the language in which this website is published, dike means what you hold water back with, and dyke means lesbian?

A better US Translation might be "levee"...

Meriam Webster, Oxford Dictionary

[Midnight Thunder]

I wasn't sure myself, so I decided to check it out:
  - According to the Meriam Webster Dyke is the British spelling of Dike: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dyke .
  - The Oxford Dictionary agrees: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/dyke_1?view=uk , though the same spelling can also mean lesbian: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/dyke_2?view=uk

So, depending where you are either spelling will do.