Exploration and production teams travel to the ends of the Earth searching for energy to power the world’s growing economies. But a pair of Dutch engineers has discovered a new form of energy in the tides off their own country, and they are leading an elite team of companies in a program to find and exploit opportunities for it worldwide. They have patented the technology and call it Dynamic Tidal Power.
DTP aims to tap the energy of tidal flow to generate electricity. “We call it the third way to exploit tidal power,” says Kees Hulsbergen, owner of consultancy Hulsbergen Hydraulic innovation & Design (H2iD). Historically, only two ways have been tried: tidal barrages and tidal stream or free-flow generators. Hulsbergen and Rob Steijn, now director River, Coast and Sea Dept., ARCADIS Nederland BV, hatched their third way in 1996, when both were senior researchers at Delft Hydraulics in the Netherlands. Now it is the focus of a Dutch-Chinese program to assess the feasibility of constructing the first DTP project on the Chinese coast near Shantou, Guangdong.