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

[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

[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: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.

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.