[usrusr]

Nice hit piece that looks like written by someone deeply invested in chemical batteries (or going mercenary for patrons who are). But his dismissal of mine shafts omits some important parts: when you have a mine, you don't just dangle a mass from an elevator winch, you fill the entire volume at the low end with ballast while discharging and get all that mass up again when charging. That's a many orders of magnitude difference in capacity versus the naive block-on-a-winch approach. And you don't just operate one winch with a Very Large Rope, you form a bucket-brigade of identical, cheap, short loops with a good handover mechanism. Or you equip the shaft with a pair of linear induction motors all the way up/down if you'd rather go solid state.

[danbruc]

Then why not pour water down the mine shaft and pump it back out? That seems a lot less complicated than transporting any kind of solid material up and down. I can think of three possible reasons - material density, loses in pumps and pipes, and potentially measure to make the mine suitable for storing water.

[usrusr]

That's what GP suggested. But unless the mine happens to be in particularly water-friendly rock or is carefully prepared for safe repeated flooding/dewatering, that would only speed up the conversion from mine to uncontrolled sinkhole. Many given up mines are expected to have active dewatering running forever, because the cost of letting them collapse or for safe filling would be so much greater than the cost of continued dewatering for the next couple of generations.

For small capacities, using water as the ballast medium would certainly be cheaper. But there's a break-even point in capacity beyond which the cost for readying the volume for water would be higher than the premium you'd have to pay for handling dry mass instead of liquid.