2 ms·
I deliberately did not talk about damming the river. Doing that would cause a lot of problems for shipping. And my house would flood for sure. The math is simp
by berkes 6y ago
I deliberately did not talk about damming the river. Doing that would cause a lot of problems for shipping. And my house would flood for sure.
The math is simpler though: potential energy is massXheight. So any one of those can be high. Small hydropower (I built this in Switzerland for fun) using a long pipe and a reversed pump can deliver significant power from a tiny brook, if the height is enough.
If you increase the height of the entire IJsselmeer with 10cm, that is an enormous mass, a gigantic potential energy.
Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue.
The temp diff is another potential energy. As is the kinetic energy (the water is going really fast!).
We can spend hours debating why things cannot be done, but that has never brought innovation.
- Someone 6y agoIJsselmeer would be storage, not extracting power. Also, building stuff “for fun” is different from doing things at scale and come out ahead. As you say “Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue”, but, in this context, IMO of utmost importance. I don’t think there are easy gains at scale to be had there. There’s a reason only a few small plants exist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_Nether...)