The Meuse river has been made navigable for ships by the construction of a cascade of seven weirs. At only two weirs hydropower facilities exist. This implies the full hydropower potential of the Meuse cascade is not utilized. Rijkswaterstaat only provides additional permits when fish friendly turbines are used. By using pump-turbines the river sections upstream the weirs might be usable as energy storage reservoirs.
The objective of this thesis is to study if the full hydropower- and energy storage potential of the Meuse cascade can be utilized by the use of pump-turbines within Dutch environmental regulations. In order to meet the objective a conceptual design of a pumped-storage hydropower plant has been compiled. By using this design, an assessment of utilizing the full hydropower- and energy storage potential of the cascade has been carried out. For the assessment a numerical model has been constructed and applied.
The cumulative installed turbine capacity for the cascade is 81 MW. The annual energy yield on hydropower is 225 GWh. The annual energy yield on pumped-stored power is 77 GWh. Up to 75.000 households can be powered with hydropower and pumped-stored power. When the Juliana canal is included in the assessment up to 131.000 households can be powered using an installed capacity of 134 MW.

The goal of this research is to assess technical and economic feasibility of hydropower at the weir-complex of Driel. A local initiative opting to improve the environment gained interest in the idea and asked Arcadis NL for help. The weir complex at Driel lays in a key position in the Dutch river Delta and regulates the flow to the IJssel and Nederrijn, both important parts of the flood protection and important shipping routes. In the Nederrijn 2 other hydro-power plants have been built at weirs. Driel was considered as well, but at the time could not be made feasible due to the low head difference at Driel. Developments in low-head hydro-power have given new possibilities and reason for reassessment. First the location has been analysed, in particular the flow situation. Except for the low head difference, the location lends itself well for a hydroelectric plant. The crux of the research is therefore in making the most of the available head. 4 variants have been worked out: a copy of the downstream hydro-power plant of Maurik as a reference, several variations on low head Kaplan turbines and an Archimedes screw have been assessed. A special variation of the Kaplan is the Venturi enhanced Kaplan, which uses part of the discharge to increase the head difference over the turbine. To estimate the annual production, first a simple approach, assuming a turbine can create a certain head difference, and later a hydraulic model incorporating hydraulic losses and using turbomachinery theory, has been used for the Kaplan design variants. The result of the comparison is that the regular Kaplan variant number 4 with 5 turbines, a combined capacity of 3.160kW and a LCOE of 0,154 € per kWh (using interest rate of 3,3%), has the best economic performance and is therefore recommended for further development. A good second option with a lower initial investment (9,6 million euros versus 20,5 of variant nr. 4) is design variant number 1 with a set of 2 Kaplan turbines having a combined capacity of 1.475kW and a LCOE of 0,161 € per kWh. Despite the regular Kaplan performing better economically, the Venturi Enhanced Kaplan Turbine certainly has potential for low head run of river hydropower and is therefore recommended for further research as well. The increase in power and produced energy gives reason to believe that further optimisation and detailing will lead to a competitive design compared to the regular Kaplan turbines.