Weekly Intelligence Brief

Dynamic Tidal Power: (Guest writer)

16 December 2009

For a very fast growing fossil fuel based country like China, a really rapid roll-in of Tidal Power is possible, especially if the new power is available from the shelf today, in massive quantities, and in a cost-effective way.

One scarcely known white paper describes a ‘third way’ to exploit tides, next to both well known methods of ‘Closed Basin’ and ‘Free Stream’. It is called Dynamic Tidal Power (DTP) by its inventors, H2iD, who are based in Emmeloord, The Netherlands.

Key to the DTP fluid mechanics principle is its novel, two-step approach. First, the continuously accelerating and decelerating masses of the tidal stream are used to create a head over a very long dam, built out from the shoreline into the sea (applying Newton’s second law, but in reverse mode, since acceleration is already provided, by free lunar delivery). The potential power so created over the dam increases with increasing dam length according to a steep upward bending curve. Second, this head is exploited in a well known way, using well known technology. Building the dam itself is no new experience, either. So, only the hydraulic source is new; all technology is available and mature. The energy cost is less than for Offshore Wind. In addition, a properly spaced twin set of such dams yields an almost constant base power, up to 20 GW, for Yellow Sea conditions. The nice thing is: for North Sea and Irish Sea conditions as well.

Read or download this paper on Dynamic Tidal Power…