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by imtringued
2159 days ago
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I personally am a fan of gravity batteries but the amount of scammy companies operating in the space is dragging the entire field down. The energy density of weights is really low so manufacturing a weight is absolutely uneconomical. What you want to do is take material from a landscape. Usually this means pumping water up a hill but you can also carve out a hydraulic cylinder out of the landscape and use water to lift it. [0] It has absolutely insane scaling potential. Energy capacity grows like so: r^4. Doubling the radius increases energy capacity 16 fold. Energy storage up to 1.6TWh is definitively possible. Of course this is so ambitious that it might never get built but I can definitively tell you that a crane system like this would be barely economical [1] because weights are really expensive but it's a good attempt and can be refined further. And finally here is an example of a scam concept: [2] Digging shafts is unaffordable unless you reuse old mine shafts which would reduce the number of shafts in the picture to just a single one.
If you can only have one weight per generator that means the system doesn't scale. The power density of lifting a 1000 ton rock 100m high is pathetic. It's just 270kWh. The cost of the concrete is negligible in this scenario but you won't find a generator that is cheap enough to compete with a conventional battery. However, to stay realistic. Gravity batteries are about as likely to happen as everyone suddenly switching to nuclear power. The odds aren't great. [0] http://www.eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-sy... [1] https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/784/10784/Ener... [2] https://offgridquest.com/images/banners/gravitybattery.png |
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