Tweet
This is not my idea. I read about it years ago. Some futuristic design, likely from the Mol brothers.
We have:
- a shallow sea or ocean that can space some space.
- with signifacant tides, say 4 meters between highest and lowest, being 6 hours apart.
We build:
A circular dam. We all know dams that hold the water in a river. This one encloses sea water. Let's use roughly 20 miles/32km circumference as a standard size unit. My country (Netherlands) built a straight dam of that size to tame our inner sea.
Anyway, the dam will have turbines all around the circumference. Extracting water power as it flows in on the high tide, as well out out on the retracting tide. We're talking about roughly 80 square kilometers of water, raised and lowered by 4 meters. A controlled tsunami, and we're extracting every joule we possibly can.
On top of the water movements, we might was well line the thing with windmills, noisy but efficient ones. Of, and if the water body it self of course, 80sq km, you can fit some there. And, while we're at it, we could float some unsinkable pontoons inside, anchored, totally covered in some sort of solar panels. Abundent surface area to play with. The windmills might even be lighter ones, mounted on the pontoons. So many ways about exploiting this.
Anyway, the point of my idea. SCALE.
Due to the squaring nature of surface inside a circular dam, if you double the LENGTH, or actual work needed to build one, you'll get a quatruple of energy potential. There will be a point where the water's viscosity will increase it's fill/drain period to about the tide's 12 hours. I have no idea at which sclae this would happen.
Significant I find that building such a structure will otherwise ALWAYS produce vastly increased energy generation potential for a relatively small increase in one-time building expense.
If you're building a generation that feeds off wave action, you'll need to build twice and much to get twice as much. Seems a good deal, but compared with the ring dam, it's not.
What I also like about the ever-increasing water volume per km of dam length, is that water velocity as it passes the dam, will increase as well, which in my limited understanding would boost turbine efficiency.
This principle, if I'm seeing this correctly, makes me wonder if it might be applicable on other sciences, preferable smaller building scale.
Any thoughts?
We have:
- a shallow sea or ocean that can space some space.
- with signifacant tides, say 4 meters between highest and lowest, being 6 hours apart.
We build:
A circular dam. We all know dams that hold the water in a river. This one encloses sea water. Let's use roughly 20 miles/32km circumference as a standard size unit. My country (Netherlands) built a straight dam of that size to tame our inner sea.
Anyway, the dam will have turbines all around the circumference. Extracting water power as it flows in on the high tide, as well out out on the retracting tide. We're talking about roughly 80 square kilometers of water, raised and lowered by 4 meters. A controlled tsunami, and we're extracting every joule we possibly can.
On top of the water movements, we might was well line the thing with windmills, noisy but efficient ones. Of, and if the water body it self of course, 80sq km, you can fit some there. And, while we're at it, we could float some unsinkable pontoons inside, anchored, totally covered in some sort of solar panels. Abundent surface area to play with. The windmills might even be lighter ones, mounted on the pontoons. So many ways about exploiting this.
Anyway, the point of my idea. SCALE.
Due to the squaring nature of surface inside a circular dam, if you double the LENGTH, or actual work needed to build one, you'll get a quatruple of energy potential. There will be a point where the water's viscosity will increase it's fill/drain period to about the tide's 12 hours. I have no idea at which sclae this would happen.
Significant I find that building such a structure will otherwise ALWAYS produce vastly increased energy generation potential for a relatively small increase in one-time building expense.
If you're building a generation that feeds off wave action, you'll need to build twice and much to get twice as much. Seems a good deal, but compared with the ring dam, it's not.
What I also like about the ever-increasing water volume per km of dam length, is that water velocity as it passes the dam, will increase as well, which in my limited understanding would boost turbine efficiency.
This principle, if I'm seeing this correctly, makes me wonder if it might be applicable on other sciences, preferable smaller building scale.
Any thoughts?