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oDDmON t1_j0kxykm wrote

Reply to comment by poopmaester41 in Switzerland’s Giant “Water Battery” Starts Working by Wagamaga

Agreed! And the “Check Yourself” section at the end was definitely a value add! 👍🏻

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IamreallynotaNPC t1_j0l836g wrote

I came here to point this out, what a great site, and sooooo cool to see an idea I have had since a kid (I am 43 now) coming to life. You could do this with any weighted objected honestly, could be dirt in a giant bucket or such, and then hoist it back with purely renewable (sun/wind/etc). I would have never thought any country would bother though.

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BeShifty t1_j0li57g wrote

FYI Pumped hydro storage was already the most popular form of energy storage in the world and has been in use for more than 100 years.

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hideogumpa t1_j0mqosl wrote

There's also the tower lifting concrete blocks, the pull a heavy train up a hill, the lift huge concrete cylinder storage... lots of ways to use gravity to recoup energy

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einmaldrin_alleshin t1_j0naiie wrote

Concrete wouldn't be scalable though, because the mass that can be lifted is limited by the weight that the mechanism can move up and down. So you get a few minutes of power at most before all the weight is on the ground.

With pumped hydro, any single pump and turbine can pump water between huge reservoirs. They can potentially provide power through an entire night or more.

So gravity storage with solids is more an alternative to flywheels and batteries, which have a much different role in the grid.

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jawshoeaw t1_j0o0jkl wrote

Concrete gravity storage has been demonstrated to be scalable. You just use more blocks of the same size. Pumped hydro is severely limited to areas that can store water without causing ecological problems. Also concrete doesn’t evaporate.

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einmaldrin_alleshin t1_j0othgk wrote

Producing concrete is an ecological disaster in itself, not to mention the cost. And while it won't evaporate, it'll break down as it's stacked and unstacked for thousands of cycles.

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Ffishsticks t1_j0lv0fl wrote

Dinorwig in Wales has been running since 1984 (construction started in 1974). Though versions have been used since 1907

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modsarefascists42 t1_j0lxrl4 wrote

Check this out

https://spectrum.ieee.org/mix-mountains-and-gravity-for-longterm-energy-storage

There's another company doing something similar by building a tower and using barrels filled with garbage as the weights. Just using the excess solar energy to lift the buckets up high then let gravity return the energy. It doesn't matter if these methods are inefficient because the source of them is free solar power.

Edit: found a different company doing the same thing lol

https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1097

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lamb_pudding t1_j0m0ucl wrote

I actually used it. At first I was like naw, I know what this article said, but it was short enough that I said why not.

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