Halfway along the Afsluitdijk, the 20-mile dam that has separated the salty Wadden Sea from the freshwater IJsselmeer since 1932, sits a small blue building that most drivers passing over the dam never notice. Since November 26, 2014, when King Willem-Alexander switched it on, this building has housed the world's first reverse electrodialysis power plant, a facility that generates electricity purely from the natural process of salt water and fresh water mixing. More than a decade later, the plant has produced something more valuable than steady power output: a detailed, published record of exactly how difficult it is to scale this kind of clean energy technology up from a laboratory concept to something resembling a real power source. The project's quiet pivot away from power generation reveals a pattern common across emerging clean energy technologies, where the science works elegantly in theory but stumbles repeatedly against the messier realities of real-world scale.
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