Tidal Energy Grevelingen Part I

The project to design an innovative Tidal Energy plant at the Brouwersdam, which connects the province of South Holland to the province of Zeeland, has began.

As part of restructuring the Grevelingen area, an inlet in the Brouwersdam is proposed to connect the North Sea with the Grevelingen lake again. This way, it is expected that the flora and fauna in the Grevelingen lake area will blossom again by bringing back the tides, like it was before the Brouwersdam was built in 1971.

One of the opportunities that arise with bringing back the tides again, is to construct a tidal power plant at the Brouwersdam in order to create a win-win situation from an ecological and economical point of view. However, there are some main challenges ahead that make common technologies in place not suitable for this situation and therefore we need to design a tidal power plant based on an innovative not-yet-proven technology, using a hydro-pneumatic system.

What makes this project special is that a completely new innovative technology will be developed further into detail, with a large chance of implementation in reality. Hereby a pending project of some hundreds of million Euros to power up more than 35.000 Dutch households.

Click here for a summary of the project.

 Some of the challenging tasks that this design project will do are related to: 

o Constructional (re-)design of the dam
o Design of the siphon and air entrainment devices
o Developing computational simulations of the water and air flow dynamics
o Mechanical/electrical design of the air turbines
o Electrical power yield calculations
o Operation & control design of the power plant
o Research in pumping mechanism of power plant
o Economical feasibility study
o Fish mortality simulations 

For more information, please send an email to erwinloonen@gmail.com.

The team
Led by Project Leader Erwin Loonen, the persons working on this project are Taha Aydin, Theo Christiaanse, Anneke de Groot, Gaurav Gupta, George Klironomos, Minos Kontos.