It's lowland position, along with experience building the Delta Works and Zuiderzee Works, means it's in a perfect position to build extensive tidal flow energy generation facilities. Rising tides will be used to inundate vast reservoirs, filling them via sluices through inlet turbines. When the tide recedes again the reservoirs would drain through through outlet turbines. To manage and store peak performance and cover times when tidal conditions require the turbines to be closed off, spare electricity generation capacity during the night will be used to pump water to additional reservoirs that stand above the high tide line - these can be drained to cover shortfalls in capacity at a higher energy yield than the tidal reservoirs due to the increased 'drop' on the water held in them. An extensive network of tidal energy generation of this nature would fit perfectly with the Netherlands' ongoing requirement to protect against high tides and storm surges from the North Sea, provide energy independence into the future and possibly create enough power to export throughout Europe.
If this technology was to be exported then cheap tidal power generation stations could be established around the world's coasts. This would make short hop 100% electrically powered ships economically viable, as they would only have to be able to reach the next station, where the lower cost electricity would be available to recharge their batteries. Who would make these high tech ships? The Netherlands, of course...
Even with electric cargo ships, it's clear that the future will be one where goods travel short distances from production to consumption, without a fuel as cheap as oil it's obvious that physical goods will not be carried halfway around the world. At the same time, people will travel such distances less as the cost of flights increases. This will create a situation where ideas are no longer transmitted around the world as rapidly as we have become used to. Luckily we already have the Internet, which is excellent for piping any form of data around the world, but rarely useful information. Even today, with telecommunications systems being better than ever, a common way that products and ideas move around the world is by businessmen and entrepreneurs seeing products in different countries, realising their potential in another market and then taking them there. Without today's levels of travel this process will be stifled.
Assuming that commercialisation remains the primary incentive for manufacturing products around the world then the licensing of designs will become more important than a single company expanding its production and exporting its goods and this process will need to be facilitated in some way. Only the web offers a platform where this could possibly occur but even on the Internet the laws of a country define how well it can support different web activities, for instance the UK has gambling laws that make it better suited to supporting gambling websites than most countries, but the royalties system on music impedes the commercial viability of web radio there. If the Netherlands were to tune its laws and legislation appropriately (perhaps automatically honouring foreign patents as rights protection within the country) then it could become the international hub for trading in product licenses over the Internet, acting as a matchmaker and clearing house for ideas from around the world. Money would be made on commissions and fractional side royalties from the system in much the same way that stock market trading does. Indeed, the trade in ideas could naturally draw investment markets to the Netherlands, increasing that side of the economy.
Thanks for sharing. Really interesting what you say...
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