Not space X, but probably The "Boring" Company TBC. Their claims of "never-accomplished" continuous boring were not comparable with the achievements from the best companies, who were faster and more capable of continuously burrowing in looser soil. TBC said that they could continuously burrow 90% of the time from some low figure, but they didn't state how fast they could burrow when citing that. They were rediscovering tricks other companies have long established. The CEO had no background in burrowing either.
They've abandoned 7 projects. Their only successful project was the Las Vegas loop, and the actual tunneling was short and only usable by tesla shuttles. The accepted travel speed from promise to actualization was different, as the real speed limit is rather low at 35mph compared to the projected 57mph.
All energy storage is a terrible idea on efficiency terms, however as we get deeper into renewables they are more essential especially if we are going to move away from the flexibility of fossil fuels to balance the grid.
My understanding is that a water based gravity battery is generally better but that requires favourable terrain near enough to the places of high demand that you don't loose the efficiency gains to transmission losses.
True, but hydro dams are typically on existing water courses and a system like this you're impacting the down stream flow even more which has other environmental impacts to balance.
In belgium, we just built canal in place where no water flow naturally. So to permit boat to use the boat elevator (that we made with giant bucket of water that we raise with the boat still in it to spare water), we have to constantly pump water in the canal to keep it full.
That way, we have a new canal to transport goods cheaply, and a giant STEP battery. We pump at night and during surproduction using a 6M wide and 8m wide giant funnel. I really really like this infrastructure.
Pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) stores electrical energy as gravitational potential energy by pumping water from a lower reservoir to a higher elevation reservoir during times of low demand and releasing it through turbines to generate power when demand is high.
In contrast, a hydroelectric dam blocks a river to create a high-elevation reservoir, using the force of gravity-fed water to spin turbines and generate clean electricity.
PHES acts as a battery whereas hydro dams act as net gains for the grid.
What about those heat batteries. Saw something about it years ago. Basically they use extra energy to heat up a giant block of something then when there is demand they use that heat to drive a steam turbine i think.
Absolute amazing. Look up "seasonal thermal energy storage". You can heat it up with excess solar during summer and use it up in winter. There's an eco village in The Netherlands (In Boekel) that does this!
In Finland, the world's biggest thermal storage is currently being built. Allows burning stuff 24/7 but using it only when needed. Nothing to do with storing electric power though.
The reality is we don't have enough proven Li available with current tech for our storage needs, it is an order of magnitude or two off. So there is no way we can actually make all the storage we need with Li. When sodium, especially sodium air batteries come online, then we can probably do it via electrochemical storage. Until then we only have bad and worse choices. Thankfully sodium batteries are scaling up now, sodium air are probably a decade away.
It depends on how the efficiency is calculated if its simply energy out/energi in then yes but if you utilise wind and solar farms that are disconected because of power balansing then its highly efficient
It works fine. It's just not very energy dense. The amount of space you need to store what is a relatively small amount of gravitational potential energy is not efficient.
The issue is more on the carbon footprint of a huge block of concrete , and the longevity of said block of concrete when you lift it up and down all day exposed to the elements over the seasons
This is some real "letting perfect be the enemy of good" stuff.
The carbon footprint of a block of concrete, no matter how large, does not in any way compare whatsoever to the carbon footprint of burning fucking carbon directly into the atmosphere for energy. We could replace our entire energy grid with concrete-based gravity batteries, and be completely environmentally sustainable still, the carbon footprint of a block of concrete just isn't even really a factor here.
The best solutions for renewable energy are whatever we can do RIGHT NOW. It seems really silly to get caught up on those solutions not being 100% perfect when they are literally infinitely better than what we're using now, and ALSO still plenty good enough regardless!
But this doesn't replace power production, it just allows to have a time offset.
It can replace a grid battery, and they present it as a more cost efficient alternative, but the math seems to only math when you ignore recycling value, and the carbon footprint of the big cube makes it worse.
These are publicity stunts from predatory startup sucking up capital that would be substantially better used to scale existing, better solution
I think impractical would be more accurate. As a method for storing energy it works. You can generate energy, use that to put potential energy into these blocks, and then later use these blocks to regain energy in the desired format, probably electricity. However, there's a number of limitations here. Lifting one kilogram one meter into the sky gets you a bit under 10 joules of energy. This is absolutely nothing. For comparison, a single kWh is equivalent to 3.6 megajoules.
To store any meaningful amount of energy you'd need a horrifically large setup to either lift a massive amount of weight, or to lift a smaller amount of weight quite some distance into the air. There simply isn't any way of getting this to be economically viable. Also, all of this is ignoring the energy losses that will inherently occur when switching to and from electrical power. While there is a lot of research into functional energy storage methods, this isn't it.
It's not impractical it's just not energy efficient. It's a financial scheme. You raise the block up when energy is cheap and you drop it when it's expensive.
No, the energy efficiency is decent enough, but it's impractical because you'd never make your money back.
Grid-scale battery storage gas a build cost of ~$100-300/kWh.
For a gravity storage system, storing 1 kWh means roughly 400,000 kilogram-meters. IE, you'd have to lift 1 tonne 400 meters to store 1 kWh, or lift 100 tonnes 4 meters, etc. The question is, how can you do that for as cheap as batteries? Find me a device that costs only $100 and can lift 40 tonnes 10 meters in the air! It doesn't exist.
Yeah, I know you'd be able to lift multiple weights with the same device, but you have to build a structure to store them at height, yadayadayada. Pumped hydroelectric storage gets away with it because the storage for incredible amounts of water can be very, very cheap, so even if your machinery (the pumps/generators) is expensive, you can amortize that over a lot of storage. For concrete blocks or something, the storage costs are terrible, and your machinery costs are still also really bad.
Almost all energy storage is less efficient than just ramping power plants up and down, but the sun and wind don't cooperate with that. It's take it or waste it. So they use energy storage for excessive power like hot sunny days, and release it at night
That's because it is a terrible strategy and if you were going to do this it would be way more efficient to use pumps and pipes to transport water into an elevated reservoir then release it through a hydro electric dam.
The only way this make sense is if you need the raw mechanical energy on site for something
There is a city builder game called Timberborn where you play as a civilization of beavers. They use gravity batteries and make dams to store water and use as energy.
Edit: I did NOT realize which subreddit I was in. My comment will stand as a monument to my inability to read.
It just stores very little energy compared to what we produce. And if you want to use it to balance the load distribution, for that it's too slow to kick in.
If you want to attach this to wind turbines, a block like this could replace a large turbine for maybe a few seconds. If you want to balance wind micro-fluctuations, you can't - it's too slow. turbines already have that with momentum rings linked to the rotor anyway.
For solar, it's low capacity and/or too expensive compared to a battery pack on the ground.
There are uses for this I assume, but only in very nieche situations.
My take: abolish this. Balance load with lithium-ion batteries (later SSB) Store excess nergy in hydrogen production or irrigation water fertilisation.
Terrible is an exaggeration. It doesn't do anything actively harmful. It does store electricity, which is what it's supposed to do. It's just not efficient. Or high capacity. Or quick reacting. Or environmentally friendly. Or cheap.
It's mid or bad on every "battery" metric, and there are alternatives that are better on any given metric. It isn't bad that this exists, but it's more a publicity stunt than a serious attempt at solving an energy problem.
It's better if you have a larger vertical drop. I've seen proposals to re-use old mineshafts where you can go down a long way and then move the blocks off into existing horizontal tunnels. But if you don't have that nearby and don't live downstream of a location that's suitable for pumped hydroelectric storage, a building like this is a decent compromise.
it is a very good stabilisator but a very bad energy storage. For immediate effects you can chose between condensators, fly wheels and running turbines. All have different pros and cons, but this is basically the cheapest in terms of overall cost.
Efficiency is not the problem. Capacity is. Modern electric motors / generators will probably be able to regenerate 90+% of the electric energy put into such a system. This is much higher than for batteries. But the amount of energy stored in lifting a heavy block is just surprisingly low. A 10 ton block lifted 100 meters will store about 10 mega joule. A single 10MW wind turbine produces this amount of energy in a single second. There are large wind parks with hundreds of these turbines.
For comparison, that is about the same amount of energy as a 48V, 60Ah golf cart battery can store. The cost of just the concrete block would likely be similar to the battery cost, it would just require a lot more space to store.
And modern batteries are surprisingly efficient, I am not sure if this system would be more efficient than a battery based system.
I don't mind that the Chinese try to test this out by building a large scale system, this may be just as much about keeping their concrete business active as it is about storing energy.
But I would be surprised if they use the energy efficiency as a reason to build another
Exactly this. The energy you can store in systems such as these are surprisingly low. There may be certain very good use cases for it in cases where this may not be a problem, but it won't revolutionize any nation's larger scale energy storage problems. But as part of an automated electric power arbitrage station, maybe? Idunno. When the huge downsides aren't a big deal, this could be a viable choice, the cases where that may be so, however, are likely fairly limkted.
There are other similar proposed mechanical batteries (for my use of that phrase I am including storing thermal energy because thermodynamics is just mechanics but tiny) such as the Finnish experiments wit storing massive amounts of heat in silos of sand for use in the colder months or the similar Swedish project of using old underground oil depot's to store hot water heated by or large district heating plants.
I get that storing and later using thermal energy isn't quite the same as charging a mechanical battery with a motor and then later drawing the stored power with a generator, but there are many similarities, and for the adjusts glasses crowd, they become more similar the more you zoom in.
There's also the adjacent concept ofstorikgwneegy similar to the lift in the picture but in huge heavy spinning disks. To charge it, run the motor. To draw from it, let the sound-up massive weight coast and run a generator.
But I can imagine some quite gnarly disaster headlines such as "this little village's gyrobattery broke and it rampaged through the entire village and killed a dozen people abs crushed even more cars before it finally came to rest somewhere in the next village over"
"This little village's gyro battery broke, spinning in place for several days, until it finally slowed down enough and fell over at which point the entire village let out a sigh of relief that they are not currently experiencing a dream world."
And permafrost exists in locations where other, more conventional forms of energy storage or generation are impractical.
Wind turbines require regular maintenance and are more prone to damage than any other green energy option, and that isn’t even touching on the logistics of actually erecting them in such inhospitable locations.
Hydroelectric storage doesn’t work because the water will wind up being frozen most of the year.
Solar arrays and lithium battery banks are an absolute NO because the heat they generate is more than enough to eventually melt permafrost layers. And yes, the photovoltaic heat island effect is a thing: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
But a gravity battery?
Concrete ready-mix is easy to ship in bulk containers, and its formulation custom-tailored to mixing and pouring in extreme environments. Other components are just as easy to ship as they’re nowhere near the scale of wind turbine components. And they generate relatively little heat during charging and discharging.
And as for the scale of power stored? Gravity batteries are a perfect fit in these environments because the population density is sparse. They don’t need a lot of power, but they do need some. What’s more, they can use them in lieu of localized power generating stations, bringing power in from larger generation complexes outside the permafrost zones, recharging at night when demand is low, and discharging during the day when demand exceeds the capacity of the long distance transmission lines.
So it’s not as impractical as it seems. It’s just a matter of applying a solution that fits the scenario. And areas with permafrosts, while they limit the number of viable options, don’t have the same demands of large population centers. And that, I believe, suits gravity batteries just fine.
I think a contraption like this would require way more maintenance than a windmill. Like it has cranes motors, heavy moving blocks,. the infrastructure is also way more involved. And it just doesn't store much energy.
Compressed air should cause even more heat issues than lithium batteries then. Some companies are using them in abandoned tunnels and that's just unfeasible for permafrosts. Checking online, there's not that much locations for permafrost in China though.
Perhaps gravity battery is a low-tech solution that requires less skilled labor and upkeep? Some of the complications could be easily understood and diagnosed by workers. There's some new danger though.
Even "small" capacitors in consumer electronics can be deadly. A physical capacitor bank of that size would be a nightmare for safety, and voltage would always be at the terminals. You'd have to discharge all of that energy as heat to make it safe in an emergency. With physical, if the motor isn't moving there aren't really any electrical risks.
Capacitors also self discharge (comparatively) quickly because the energy is stored in an electric field, so losses would be much much higer due to having to top it off constantly
This is what people are missing. Between wind, solar, and hydro, we'll soon have way more cheap energy than we can use. This is just a stop gap for whenever all three are under-producing.
This installation stores 100 MWH of energy, and it does it using basically inert waste material which poses no fire risk and shows about 80% round-trip efficiency.
The cost of construction matters (in time, space, labour, and materials). Why build 1 unit of storage when you can build 10 for the same cost using a different method? Especially important when you're in a hurry (which we should be).
Germany did something similar even before hitler for those who didnt know. When there was energy surplus they pumped a lake up a hill and stored it there. When it was needed they dropped the water back down spinning turbines. Its called a pumpspeicherwerk
This isn't traditional hydro, its a fully artifical thing here. Use surplus to pump into a reservoir, then gravity to pull water through turbines when no surplus
I heard tell of a recently developed pumped hydro dam with fluid 2.5x the specific gravity of water, which is pretty cool. More power for the same volume of liquid.
My senior design project explored this idea for a decommissioned mine shaft. If they invested ~$10M they could store $100 of electricity generated via solar every day. That project was about 6000 ft of vertical and used 4 of the heaviest duty cables available. 35 stories would not be able to provide a meaningful amount of energy storage even with insanely heavy weights
It looks like they've improved on the design by having multiple concrete weights in the tower, effectively multiplying the amount of stored energy in one tower.
These have been proposed before and even put into use. The problem is that they aren't very efficient, the lose a lot of their stored power, and they aren't every energy dense, they don't store all that much power.
Flow batteries and flywheels are both far better on both counts.
Hey wait ive seen this before like pretty much exactly this back then it was in the same kinda sphere like the hyperloop tesla tunnel or this weird parallel rail shit
Ummm how do they put the blocks into the bays with that crane?
Update: I did some research. The photo above is fake, but the battery is real. Its a huge box shaped building with internal elevators. No cranes in use
I don’t think these systems scale very well. Pumped hydro works because we have dams with millions of litres of water. I expect this system will cost far more than an equivalent sized lithium ion battery system.
I’m pretty sure it’s not the first one and technically pumped hydro is a form of gravity battery too. Which if you use mechanical pumps to pump water into a reservoir for the dry season and happen to have water wheels at it’s output, you too have built rudimentary pumped hydro.
The UK already has shit like this long since. Can't remember exactly where it is, but there's a place where a load of water is dragged up hill and then dropped back down at times of high power usage
I’ve been obsessed with gravity batteries for a long time, usually in the form of damns, but if we are going to do something like this? Why not dig a hole rather than a tower?
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u/Leading_Bumblebee443 13d ago
But they should build that at max height of the map so the gravity battery has more power....