[Sorgam]

What advantage does this provide over combining all your weights together into one big one? If you want to limit the tension on the cable, just use more cables.

You shouldn't be so confident that you know the only "sane" way to design such a thing. It's not a field anyone has experience in. These are only guesses.

[Pxtl]

Well, it does mean your cables and dynamo can be smaller. But then you've got a new problem of coupling the cables to the load at the bottom and somehow storing loads at the top that the cables must reach past/through.

[tasty_freeze]

You have a shaft 1km or 1.5km deep. You can afford to stack a lot of weights vertically. Imagine each has a hole running through the middle, where the cable runs, and a mechanism whereby the weight can engage/disengage from the cable. The cable forms a circular loop that passes through all the weights from the top of the shaft to the bottom, then circles around past a large pulley and back to the top, completing the loop.

At the top of the shaft there would be hefty prongs that retract when the weight needs to start dropping, and when the weight returns during a recharge cycle, the prongs reinsert themselves in to the shaft when the weight is lifted back into position.

Most likely each weight would have a "C" cross section with a nearly closed mouth -- just a slot from the edge of the weight to the larger central opening so that the weight can be removed/replaced from the cable if needed.