[Kon5ole]

>Isn't there a better article? >maybe they mean 2 MWh, but if that's the case, it is a joke.

There are tons of equally bad articles about this story, which is sad to see. Quality journalism might not be dead but it sure is outnumbered!

However, reading about the proposed mechanism I might charitably interpret it as being able to deliver 2MW peak power, for however long it has available sand.

So an interesting aspect of this is how much area is available for sand, not just how tall the shaft is. If it has sand for 10 hours of operation it can store 20 MWh, if it has sand for 100 hours it stores 200MWh.

Many questions remain, but if it is more efficient than generating hydrogen, and takes less space than pumped hydro (or can be made in areas unsuitable for pumped hydro) there might be a point to it.

[weebull]

It's not just that the journalists are technically illiterate. It's also that the people making these claims are trying to deceive. You needs lakes of water to have enough mass to make gravity batteries practical. Those are called pumped-hydro. Anything talking about dropping heavy things is probably about 6 orders or magnitude too small and a scam to get government funding.