Gravity Could Solve Renewable Energy's Biggest Problem (cnn.com) 249
In the Swiss municipality of Arbedo-Castione, a 70-meter crane stands tall. Six arms protrude from the top, hoisting giant blocks into the sky. But these aren't building blocks, and the crane isn't being used for construction. From a report: The steel tower is a giant mechanical energy storage system, designed by American-Swiss startup Energy Vault, that relies on gravity and 35-ton bricks to store and release energy. When power demand is low, the crane uses surplus electricity from the Swiss grid to raise the bricks and stack them at the top. When power demand rises, the bricks are lowered, releasing kinetic energy back to the grid. It might sound like a school science project, but this form of energy storage could be vital as the world transitions to clean energy.
"There's a big push to get renewables deployed," Robert Piconi, founder of Energy Vault, tells CNN Business, adding that companies are under increasing pressure from governments, investors and employees to decarbonize. But relying on renewables for consistent power is impossible without energy storage, he says. Unlike a fossil fuel power station, which can operate night and day, wind and solar power are intermittent, meaning that if a cloud blocks the sun or there's a lull in the wind, electricity generation drops. To compete with fossil fuels, you need to "make renewables predictable," says Piconi, which means storing excess energy and being able to dispatch it when required.
[...] Instead, Energy Vault decided to base its technology on a method developed over 100 years ago, which is widely used to store renewable energy: pumped storage hydropower. During off-peak periods, a turbine pumps water from a reservoir on low ground to one on higher ground, and during periods of peak demand, the water is allowed to flow down through the turbine, generating electrical energy. Piconi says Energy Vault relies on gravity in the same way, but "instead of using water, we're using these composite blocks." By doing it this way, he says the company is not dependent on topography and doesn't have to dig out reservoirs or create dams, which can have negative effects on the environment.
"There's a big push to get renewables deployed," Robert Piconi, founder of Energy Vault, tells CNN Business, adding that companies are under increasing pressure from governments, investors and employees to decarbonize. But relying on renewables for consistent power is impossible without energy storage, he says. Unlike a fossil fuel power station, which can operate night and day, wind and solar power are intermittent, meaning that if a cloud blocks the sun or there's a lull in the wind, electricity generation drops. To compete with fossil fuels, you need to "make renewables predictable," says Piconi, which means storing excess energy and being able to dispatch it when required.
[...] Instead, Energy Vault decided to base its technology on a method developed over 100 years ago, which is widely used to store renewable energy: pumped storage hydropower. During off-peak periods, a turbine pumps water from a reservoir on low ground to one on higher ground, and during periods of peak demand, the water is allowed to flow down through the turbine, generating electrical energy. Piconi says Energy Vault relies on gravity in the same way, but "instead of using water, we're using these composite blocks." By doing it this way, he says the company is not dependent on topography and doesn't have to dig out reservoirs or create dams, which can have negative effects on the environment.
I find the concept interesting (Score:2)
I wonder about efficiency compared to dams. The fact that you don't have to flood a valey sure is a plus (we Swiss are very keen on pluses, you know).
I also wonder about the capacity of such a thing... how expensive is it compared to a dam per MWh of capacity?
If it's in TFA, well, I'm old school... we don't do TFA :D.
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I don't think it is better for an area to be plastered with bricks compared to turned into a lake. At least the lake is an important ecosystem, while bricks that are being moved around are not a good habitat.
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Reservoirs also end up releasing more GHG's due to the buildup of organic matter on their bottoms.
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Making concrete also releases huge amounts of CO2.
Let's do some math: 35 tonnes * 70 meters * Gravity (10 m/s^2) = 24 megajoules = 7 kwh
If the energy cost at night is 5 cents/kwh and 10 cents during the day, a 35-tonne block will generate 35 cents per day.
Do you really think that is enough to offset the CO2 generated and millions spent to build and maintain this tower?
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Interesting map, but almost no sites in the middle and southeastern US. There basically has to be mountainous terrain and a good source of water. You would also want to be near big cities or existing power plants because they are where the transmission lines and the customers are. That eliminates many of the sites.
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A good source of water is optional since pumped hydro doesn't consume any except to leakage and evaporation, which can both be dramatically mitigated. It may take longer to fill it the first time without causing problems downstream, but once full you're good to go.
Power lines to new locations definitely adds to the cost, but across much of the US especially the existing infrastructure is badly in need of replacement anyway, and the old fossil power plants are largely irrelevant in the long term, so it may
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The large amount of water for pumped hydro generally requires a river or an existing lake as the lower reservoir, and I think you are underestimating evaporation particularly in warm sunny climates. I don't know what you mean by 'mitigation', but covering the reservoirs is not practical.
Transmission lines are immensely expensive and a solution that just reuses what's already there can be built immediately for way less money.
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Using an existing body of water for one reservoir is a cost-saving measure, and comes at the cost of losing water to ground flow, where a constructed reservoir is typically built with an impermeable lining.
Evaporation is completely optional - you can put a roof over the thing easily enough, it just saves money if you can avoid it.
Both definitely considerations when comparing pumped hydro to alternatives - but I suspect stacked blocks still have a long way to go before they can compete on cost even with a fu
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Whoops, accidentally deleted a sentence:
>you can put a roof over the thing easily enough, it just saves money if you can avoid it...
Even just an impermeable membrane floating on the surface will do the job.
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There have been several projects where you basically pump water back up a hill and store it in a reservoir... but that assumes, for one thing, that you have water, a hill and a reservoir at hand.
Towers, on the other hand, can be built anywhere.
Re:I find the concept interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
You could build a tower and fill it with water.
It would be much cheaper, need less maintenance, and would work without all those needless mechanical complications.
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Are you sure you thought that through?
Imagine those concrete blocks are hollow and you can fill them with water. Why would that be more difficult than this crane?
Now imagine we optimize that structure mathematically to maximize the ratio of water:concrete.
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The vertical loads would be the same, however water pressure acts in all directions, which means you need insane inward reinforcement to a tall tower.
For comparison, typical concrete can withstand a compressive pressure of 2500psi - equivalent to a water column 1.8km tall. However it has very little strength in tension, so if you're trying to contain a tall column of water you need some insane metal reinforcements ringing the block, which drives the cost up dramatically.
Typically any sort of concrete-based
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One of the problems with using fluids is that they're viscous, and you're losing useful energy to thermalization every time you move it. With bricks, that issue is still present, but a much smaller one.
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They're both stupid ideas, just one is more stupid than the other.
In reality we'd be far better off dropping a large lead weight down a very deep hole. It could be much deeper than you can possibly build a crane and lead is much denser. There'll also be no wind to fight against.
They're already doing it in the UK using old mine shafts.
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Suitable geography is available within a few hundred miles of virtually every major population center on Earth. A stone's throw as power transmission distances go. And water is available everywhere humans live - it's kind of essential for our survival.
A properly designed hydro storage system can consume zero water once filled. If water is scarce you may have to thoroughly seal your hydro storage system against leakage and evaporation, and it may take a few years to fully fill the reservoir without depri
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Or you could just use salt water for your pumped storage. It wouldn't function as a reservoir, but wouldn't deprive people of potable water. A small bonus is that salt water is a bit heavier, so can store more energy in the same volume.
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A good point - most major population centers are near the coast after all.
Salt water tends to be much more unfriendly to machinery though, so desalinating it first is probably a lot cheaper than dealing with the increased maintenance costs.
Re: I find the concept interesting (Score:2)
It's probably not without issues running salt water through your turbines. My old chem teacher in engineering school used to say that sea water is the closest thing to the "universal solvent", dissolving damn near anything given time.
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I've always heard that pure water is the universal solvent. After all, that's how the salt got in the ocean in the first place.
Re:I find the concept interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, this is, in fact, a big science fair project. It's technology that works basically as advertised, but is not competitive and it's basically physically impossible for it to ever be competitive. A battery the mass of a single one of its blocks could potentially store 129X as much as the crane with all 6 blocks raised. True, the crane could add more height and more blocks, but there are structural limits (which can be overcome with more and stronger materials, but that adds cost), but it does not seem it could ever be cheap enough. Pumped hydro storage normally works because you have an available hill or mountain and an area on it you can use as a reservoir. You get the elevation basically for free. For this, you have to build it.
This project should probably died in the planning stages from a few calculations on the back of a napkin. The trouble is, since the idea actually, demonstrably works they were able to get funded to this point. Presumably investors are under the impression that the competitiveness issue will be worked out somehow. I'm personally at a loss as to how anyone could expect that to happen though. I mean, this is a great idea for power storage if you're in, for example, a post apocalyptic landscape and you have some solar panels and an old crane. In a competitive modern environment, where their demonstrator has already basically reached maximum potential and is already beaten out by products on the market, it just seems pointless.
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Nobody cares about the weight of the battery - the relevant question is whether the blocks can store more energy than an equivalent *cost* of batteries. And blocks are pretty cheap.
Are they planning to keep the blocks suspended? That seems unlikely - pretty much every variation I've seen has the blocks being stacked into a tower, so the strength of the crane is only relevant to the instantaneous power it can store/deliver. The storage capacity is determined only by the crane's height and reach (= how big
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Suitable geography is definitely not available in quite a few places where there is little or no mountainous terrain. Nowhere in Florida for example, the US Gulf Coast, most of Texas and the flat states of middle America.
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This is true - however all coastal areas have a relatively easy alternative - put a big rigid container underwater and the water out of it to be displaced by air.air. You're essentially doing the same the same thing - displacing a volume of water from the tank to the surface.
But yeah, there are a few places around the world, like middle America, where pumped hydro isn't particularly viable and this could find a niche. But most of those places also don't have a lot of people or energy demands, so it will
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Market (Score:3)
I'd imagine these things are ideal for areas with little land or water, as, from what I've read, water based energy storage systems are very efficient. You can run the pump motors in their most efficient power band and, as you need to absorb more power, you just fire up more pumps. Building them is fairly energy efficient, too, as you normally take an existing lake and dredge it out to make it larger.
As far as environmental damage goes, it's pretty minor, all things considered. You're taking an existing lak
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It actually would take two "lakes", an upper and a lower reservoir that have to be separated by an appropriately large vertical drop. In practice the upper reservoir at least would probably have to be artificially created and dedicated to the purpose. They would be connected by an expensive pipeline or tunnel. There are working installations like this but only where the geography is appropriate.
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I'd imagine these things are ideal for areas with little land or water, as, from what I've read, water based energy storage systems are very efficient.
Only if you already have a big tower that you aren't using. Otherwise they just don't store enough energy to justify the expense and complexity of construction. So many other power storage systems work a lot better. Heck, I'm pretty sure stretching a bunch of big springs could work better. Or pumping compressed air into cylinders, etc.
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I also wonder about the capacity of such a thing... how expensive is it compared to a dam per MWh of capacity?
Ridiculously expensive. It would never be economical to build such a system for storage from scratch. You could only ever practically do this if you happened to have the equipment lying around and didn't have other plans for it. The max energy you can get out of a 35 ton block raised 70 meters is about 24 megajoules. That's about 6.7 kWh or 45 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries. This crane has six arms. That would then be equal to about 40 kWh (about 270 kg of li-ion batteries) which would power about one a
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It's garbage. A moneypit for gullible moneymorons. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Energy Vault is a Dumb Idea, Here's Why [youtube.com]
I.e. It's a scam.
debunked already (Score:5, Informative)
Debunked already on many occasion, ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Besides, similar systems using gravity exist. They use water in a large basin, are pretty efficient and can reach massive scales.
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Looking at their website it does seem like a half baked idea. As your video points out, there are obvious issues like wind.
There are a few advantages over pumped storage, like being able to be deployed where you don't have room for a reservoir, but the design just seems like they haven't really thought it through.
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Debunked already on many occasion, ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Besides, similar systems using gravity exist. They use water in a large basin, are pretty efficient and can reach massive scales.
Your video suggests that (1) blocks are a waste of CO2 to build, (2) the tower is unstable, (3) it'd be better to dig it out underground, (4) it'd be better to use water instead of blocks, (5) it'd be better to just use mountains and reservoirs.
The SUMMARY ITSELF pre-empted your points (3,4,5): It said using blocks it's "not dependent on topography and doesn't have to dig out reservoirs or create dams, which can have negative effects on the environment"
I think if you post a link which depends on topography
Re:debunked already (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me preface this by saying that I think gravity energy storage is largely a dumb idea with the one exception of pumped hydro, which allows for usefully large storage without proportionally complex engineering/logistics.
That said... *puts rant hat on*
Adam Something "debunks" nothing. He latches on to a handful of engineering challenges, declares them impossible or impractical to solve, and that's it. Maybe throws in a few non-sequiturs for good measure ("oh no making all that concrete will produce CO2!")
The problem is Adam Something, and others like him, speaks far outside whatever sphere of expertise they might have without doing the necessary, honest research. They become just another jackass spouting opinions into the faces of people who are eager to have an "authority" they can use to prop up an idea that's already ossified in their minds. You can tell they're pandering to an audience seeking affirmation of because sarcasm and derogatory tone - none of which is necessary if you actually have a point to make, but work REALLY well to reel in people looking for validation. It's not about an honest discussion about merits and challenges, it's about getting people to cheer for dunking on an opponent.
That's what separates your Adam Somethings and Thunderf00ts from your Tom Scotts and Steve Moulds.
And because they almost always latch on to whatever the controversy of the week is, and rely so much on emotional reactions and denigration, I think it's a fair comparison to put them next to Steve Crowder or Alex Jones... just tailored for people who fancy themselves science/technology nerds.
=Smidge=
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Debunked already on many occasion, ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Besides, similar systems using gravity exist. They use water in a large basin, are pretty efficient and can reach massive scales.
This "debunking" is pretty poor, IMO. He doesn't talk about the psychics of just about anything, just looks at the one specific design from this one company and complains about things that might be problems. For example, he repeatedly says the wind will be a problem. Perhaps I missed something, but we've figured out how to safely operate cranes in locations subject to high wind for a hundred years already. He then follows up this strawman by making the ridiculous argument of putting the whole structure in s
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Debunked already on many occasion, ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Besides, similar systems using gravity exist. They use water in a large basin, are pretty efficient and can reach massive scales.
I would call it infeasible rather than debunked. I agree that pumped storage is generally a much more elegant option. However, it still has some pretty big drawbacks. [youtube.com] Batteries, like the Tesla Megapack [wikipedia.org], seem to be a much better option. A 5 gallon bucket of water would have to be at an altitude of 100 miles to have the same energy as a single lithium ion cell.
Gravitational potential energy just isn't a very efficient way to store energy, by multiple measures.
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Anyone can work out the math themselves. You can probably stake out a construction site and catch a crane operator going off duty too.
It's got severely limited capacity, requires a lot of material, and it's pretty unclear you can even make the thing work reliably, although I guess this demo will test that.
I think you'd be way better off making hydrogen or synthetic jet fuel.
This doesn't compare to hydro (Score:4)
The amount of energy from hydro is related to volume/mass, and it isn't hard to see how the mass of pumped hydro could be much more than a crane system. But you don't have other problems like leakage and evaporation
Re: This doesn't compare to hydro (Score:2)
Yeah.
Potential energy is the same, whatever it's source. Just off the top of my head: 70 meters is similar to the head of a hydro dam. But water is about a ton per cubic meter, 35 cubic meters would run through a turbine on the order of minutes. Here [engineeringtoolbox.com] is an interesting calculator.
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Ask anyone involved in electrical transmission
That would be me.
net transmission resistance is far more important than generation capacity
You can put these towers up practically anywhere. Near the power source or the load, reducing transmission losses. Pumped hydro only goes where you have a location for a reservoir.
Rock is quantumized - can't lift half a block.
You can lift it half way.
The biggest problem with blocks and towers is that you'd have to put up a lot of them to get any useful storage capacity. Maybe a couple every square mile or so in a residential area to serve the loads. They'd be sticking up all over the place like a bunch of 5G antenn ....
Wait a minute!
Busted (Score:3, Informative)
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I'm not sure I'd accept Thunderf00t as an authority. He seems to have a weakness for reaching a conclusion he likes, then casting about for data supporting it while ignoring data that don't.
This article gives a lot more information than you'd probably want, but the parts relevant to this discussion seem to indicate he's just another of those tiresome neo-cons who prioritize advancing their point of view over an honest review of evidence.
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Sounds like every boss I've ever had.
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Thunderf00t is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, but in this case I tend to agree with him. This article [wattisduurzaam.nl] seems to cover a lot of issues with the idea. Seems like a good way to milk some VCs for money, but not such a good way to actually store energy.
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Both videos are largely bogus. Their main points are that the 'tower' would be subject to wind stress, and the blocks would be made of concrete which results in CO2 emissions.
These days the tower concept has changed to a building, so it is enclosed and protected from the weather. The blocks were never made of concrete, they are compressed soil or waste held together by some kind of polymer.
"the bricks are made from locally sourced soil, sand, or waste materials, including outputs of fossil fuel production,
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The lower profile building kind of makes it worse though. It sounds like those debunking videos are pretty bad if they don't debunk this simply by looking at the power storage potential of this tower (40 kWh with 6 blocks) and comparing it against, for example, a single Telsa battery pack with twice the storage potential. Now, maybe they can double, or triple the number of blocks, but it's 210 tons per set and you pretty quickly get to the point where your structure maybe can't carry the load. Not to mentio
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Energy Vault apparently has a machine they would transport and assemble onsite that makes the blocks out of nearby soil or appropriate kinds of waste like fly ash, compressed and held together with some kind binder. They don't use a tower now, modular buildings said to be 100 meters tall. There may well be some hidden disadvantages to the concept but the company does have some large contracts to build installations.
"As to cost, according to Bloomberg NEF June 2020 Energy Storage Review, it’s LCOE of $
Kinetic storage and lifted water more efficient. (Score:5, Interesting)
For storage over night to a few days lifted water is more efficient and quite less wear prone than lifting or spinning up a weight. A water tower or a dam is a well known structural problem to solve. A 12 km pipeline going up 2000 m, that cost can be computed to the dollar before entering into a 20 year deal. That water turbines/pumps and electric generators/motors have 200 years of research already done gets lost on the silicon valley crowd. Things like maintained intervals and lifetimes have been calculated for 100 years. A 1920s power plant at a dam only has gotten control equipment upgrades for the past 100 years. The only break shoes and springs to maintain are on the control failure emergency stop mechanism.
You got to wonder if going to more unknown technologies is the way energy storage projects get funded, more space in the error bars to possibly present a profit for investors and tax payers.
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I enjoyed your commentary.
I was saying the same thing to myself, the lack of deep long term research, and proof testing of bad ideas if data can not be found.
worst part is, I kept thinking, where are all the abandoned hillside mines or quarries that could be utilized. something has to be off or someone is not testing correctly.
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Where do you find a nearby 2000 meter vertical incline and enough room for an upper reservoir adjacent to Dallas or Miami?
Easily found (Score:2)
Where do you find a nearby 2000 meter vertical incline and enough room for an upper reservoir adjacent to Dallas or Miami?
Abandoned office buildings.
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Where do you find a nearby 2000 meter vertical incline and enough room for an upper reservoir adjacent to Dallas or Miami?
Abandoned office buildings.
Yikes, them's some pretty tall office buildings. I didn't know humans had surpassed even the 1 Km mark yet for office buildings, let alone 2.
--
.nosig
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One could have said the same thing about proven technologies at the time they were unproven. It's not like the implication of this kind of work is, "It's perfect! Replace everything and build them everywhere!"
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I mostly agree, but I'm very uncertain about your claims of "efficiency". I'd like to see the entropy costs of moving viscous water about, vs. blocks which don't have nearly the number of modes into which to thermalize energy.
Disused mine shafts (Score:2)
In the UK, an idea is suspending heavy weights in old coal mine shafts. There are loads of those. If the mines are in a fit state, you get infrastructure almost for free. Also, the impact on the environment and landscape is minimal. I think all the visible structure you would need is something like the old mine head gear. That might have some sentimental appeal in former coal mining regions.
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Very perfect idea if the concept is viable.
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The concept is completely viable. It's just only competitive if you don't have to build a giant tower. So old pre-existing shafts might be a great idea, as long as you don't have to spend a lot on the actual weights you're going to be lowering down the mines and you accept that the system is not going to provide very much storage, and you don't have to do much buildout of the electrical grid to get to the old shaft.
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The numbers (Score:3, Insightful)
Potential energy = mgh. A 35-ton block is about 35000kg, so the potential energy of raising it 70m is 35000 * 9.8 * 70 or around 24MJ. Six of them means a total energy storage of 144MJ or about 40 kwH. That would power maybe a couple of houses for a day. It's a tiny amount of energy in the grand scheme of things.
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while I am not sure the concept is viable, the value of the concept should be more towards localized on the spot needs instead of peak natural gas production.
best way I can picture it is: ( USA mindset) Nuke and solar plants on weekend's load up these towers because the base loads are low. at peak loads they are released.
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But 40 kWh, is quite obviously less than the battery packs in most electric cars. Battery packs that should cost a _lot_ less than a 70 meter tall tower with multiple crane arms.
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To put it into perspective, that's less than the smallest Tesla car battery. Today, 40kWh is the kind of battery you can expect on a small electric city car.
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Yeah, that's less than the capacity of a Tesla car battery.
I doubt a lot that the real estate for the tower, the tower itself, the weights, motors, generators etc. as well as building and maintaining the ducking thing are in any way cheaper than such a battery.
Gravity energy storage always looks like a great idea until you run the numbers.
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The physics doesn't work (Score:3)
The potential energy is way too small. eg 35 ton block raised 100 m , assume gravity = 10 gives 35M joules. Big deal. Ok, you have 10 of them and can store 350MJ. So you'd be able to output 350MW (the power output of a pretty small power station) for , uh, 1 second.
There's a reason dams store MILLIONS of tons of water behind them, sometimes billions.
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Agreed. Some years ago there was an article about someone who had invented a gravity-powered light for domestic use. Unfortunately, although it seemed like a good idea, the calculations (arts student) were several orders of magnitude out, so instead of hours of output it would have been a few seconds.
This project sounds fairly similar. The energy density is far too low to provide much utility, especially when construction costs are taken into account.
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These are scams (Score:2)
Kind of sad our editors don't already know this.
Also, there are plenty of other, better solutions to this problem. Some of which are discussed in the video above.
Also, I can't recommend YouTuber Adam Something enough. If you don't like falling for tech scams he covers several. I really hate being scammed, so I like anyone who debunks them.
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Okay so, I've already ranted in another post about this guy but I suppose I should make a separate post about this video specifically and why it's bullshit.
Here are the points Adam Something makes, in order:
1) Making concrete emits CO2. He does not expand on this, just says "Making concrete emits CO2" and never mentions it again. Doesn't mention that concrete reabsorbs CO2 over time, doesn't mention possible CO2 reduction from better use of renewables thanks to storage... he just doesn't discuss it. He says
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How much Gravity is there left? (Score:5, Funny)
If we use up all the gravity we will end up floating off into space.
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and with inflation the way it is, the price of gravity just keeps going.... wait, isn't gravity supposed to go down?
Gravity storage is another gimmick (Score:2)
Gen3 / Gen4 nuclear is the only solution that meets or exceeds 24/7 capacity needs. Without gimmicks.
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Maybe if most Gen 4 nuclear plants hadn't been sodium fire pits they'd have made some headway.
I see a better, cheaper way: skyscrapers (Score:2)
So, what they want is a bunch of heavy things, and a mechanism to move them up and down to store electric energy. We already have most of such a mechanism. They're called elevators in skyscrapers (or other high-rise buildings.) Some are already designed to capture energy this way! [wikipedia.org]
Now, one could leave a weight in one elevator all the time, but that's not very efficient. We need a way to move heavy objects about the size of a person in and out of elevators. Well, Amazon designed little round robots to mo
Swiss clockwork (Score:3)
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Build a gym right next to it: (Score:2)
pumped hydro alternative? (Score:2)
But a system like this could be built cheaply and easily almost anywhere. So I am guessing this is more an alternative to lithium battery storage, and I'd love to know how it compares to e.g. those gigantic Tesla grid battery stations.
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According to TFA, the tower is 70m tall. Assuming all 70m is used for storage, that gives a maximum potential energy density of ~700J/kg before efficiency losses. That is 1/250th of a lead-acid battery and 1/700th of a modern flywheel system or compressed air storage. A Li-ion battery has >1,000x greater energy density.
Built cheaply and easily? Concrete is what, $100 a tonne or of that order? That is the equivalent of 700kJ of storage, which is about 15 18650 Li-ion cells, which you can get for well unde
An easy resource (Score:2)
For gravity storage, we could offer up all the morons who post to slashdot who have no interest in tech, just pushing their idiotology. Their heads are already solid granite....
Slashdot editors don't read Slashdot? (Score:2)
Is there a news for nerds site where the editors don't post dupes of debunked stories? I'll change my bookmark...
Raccoon Mountain... (Score:2)
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How is gravity going to solve human greed?
Greed isn't something to be "solved", it's something to be harnessed to motivate people in positive directions, such as towards solving energy-storage problems in environmentally-friendly ways as a way of earning money.
That said, you could "solve greed" with Lithium technology; give everyone a daily dose of lithium so they don't care about anything. I'm not sure that would yield a desirable result, though.
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There is a difference between greed, ambition and Enterprising.
Greed is a negative connotation, in which someone who desires to collect more, at the expense of others.
While Ambition is a more neutral connotation where they want to collect more, however it is kinda more neutral on how they achieve it.
Enterprising is a positive connotation where their ability to collect more is based on what they do to assist the rest of the community.
The real problem with energy isn't necessarily the state of mind of those w
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>To compound said problems, media in general know that people are risk adverse, so will amplify the negatives to get more views, because getting you audience to be afraid of something, brings in the viewers
And how the negatives are distributed demographically and how much clout the affected group(s) have can further drive up politician's and media's focus on the negatives.
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As one who is greedy and wealthy works up the business cycle, will undoubtedly will get a fancy job on top of a sky scraper. Their greed will cut cornets in said skyscraper safety and quality. Thus one day when they look down on all the little people who they stepped on to get where they had gotten, the window would give way, and then gravity would solve human greed.
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I was trying to imply that greed WAS renewable energy's biggest problem. Or rather, biggest barrier to widespread adoption. And anyway it was supposed to be humor. Judging by the responses, nobody thought this was funny. Well, nobody but me, anyway.
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There's already plenty of alternatives.
https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]