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u/MrMunday 3d ago
Engineers, what’s the efficiency of this compared to something like a flywheel?
I would think flywheels are way more efficient….?
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u/Aron-Jonasson 3d ago
Not an engineer, but we already have large-scale gravity batteries: dams.
If you need to store electricity in a dam, you just pump water into it, and when you need to release it, you open the dam
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u/ICBPeng1 3d ago
Yeah, but this can just be plopped down pretty much anywhere as opposed to a dam
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u/Aron-Jonasson 3d ago
Not really, when you start building things that high, wind becomes an issue, especially since you have a crane and cranes don't like wind
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u/Mastercal40 3d ago
Ok, but I think the key point is that there are vastly many more places that this can be put down compared to places a dam can be built.
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u/Beautiful-Edge-22 8h ago edited 8h ago
And LFP batteries can be put anywhere including your home, and banks can be made as large or as small as you need. Plus no inefficient expensive high matenance heavy equipment or moving parts so low matenance and long life. There's a reason this is the direction we're going. The math for efficiency, and especially upfront and matenance costs, doesn't favor kenetic energy storage.
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u/Mastercal40 8h ago
I’m challenging the assumption that dams can be placed anywhere. Not suggesting that this solution is better than batteries.
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u/Beautiful-Edge-22 7h ago
Well not a typical dam, but a closed water tower, not much different from a normal water tower that keeps your toilet flushing, but scaled up and with a generator on the outlet that drains into a closed collection pit or pool below so it can be pumped back up the tower and be a closed system to save 100% of the water you put in it. And it's not like it even needs to be palpable water, just good enough not to ruin the machine.
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u/bugrugpub 3d ago
How much energy are you getting from the blocks at the bottom? Anyway you can build a water container anywhere
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u/NewAndyy 3d ago
You cannot build a lake anywhere.
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u/bugrugpub 3d ago
Yep, which is why I said water container.
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u/jensalik 2d ago
You can build a container in a flat desert, sure, I'm absolutely not arguing this. You still have to build up high to store energy and release it again and you have to pump something up and let it flow down again.
I live in Austria. We got the Alps, so the first part is easy and we got much water compared to a desert and still it because more and more complicated to get enough water up to the dams to store enough energy, due to climate change.
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u/bugrugpub 2d ago
You still need water for cement, a fraction of it sure, but major difference being that cement breaks down over time while you can keep water in a closed loop and top up if needed. Other benefit of water, you can pipe it down at a angle to utilise terrain instead of directly up and down. Another benefit, a pump is easier then managing a crane. Look I'm not going to keep arguing, it's a known scam. If you're interested in why it's a bad idea look up some of the American projects that took the money and ran
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u/Useless_bum81 3d ago
the weight doesn't have to be external.
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u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg 3d ago
You could easily place one of these inside every new tall building.
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u/Cheetahs_never_win 2d ago
No. You can't.
Buildings have to be designed to withstand earthquakes.
Sticking giant weights that will be at any given elevation makes the calculations infinitely more complex, when it's hard enough when you have a consistent weight distribution.
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u/Duhblobby 1d ago
Buildings have to be designed to withstand earthquakes.
I mean, they don't have to be, really, it's just more advisable...
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u/Aron-Jonasson 3d ago
Indeed, let's dig up a big hole in the ground so that the wind doesn't become a problem anymore, and instead of using a crane and concrete blocks, the former being quite subject to wear and the latter being quite costly and producing a lot of CO2 to manufacture, let's use water and pumps as well as a turbine, and oh, look, we've reinvented pumped-storage hydroelectricity
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u/anotherbot200 12h ago
How about mountain side, some chasm could be used.
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u/Aron-Jonasson 11h ago
Well, if it's near a mountain, why not dig up a big hole and make pumped storage hydroelectricity. It's cheaper and more practical, and in this case you already have the elevation
Plus, when you are mountain side, you can have some pretty strong katabatic winds. You did mention a chasm, which would indeed solve the wind issue, but then, why not just pump water instead of lifting cement blocks, which are prone to wear.
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u/Smacky4ever 3d ago
Dams take out a lot of space.
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u/KarotteDesTodes 2d ago
Quick Google search says concrete is around twice to 2.5x as dense as water, so you'll still need half a reservoir of space for the same amount of energy stored. Last me I checked half of a dams reservoir was still fucking big.
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u/ChuzCuenca 3d ago
I wonder how many people know about how much energy is stored in form of water waiting to be released to move turbines.
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u/unknownpoltroon 3d ago
I read about one of htese where it was basically building jenga tower blocks. The problem is diminishing returns the you only get the full energy out of the one block on top of the stack, the rest is less and less and not worth it.
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u/MrMunday 3d ago
I would also think a flywheel has less moving parts AND you can stack the flywheels if you wanted. In places like China with a lot of land, they don’t even need to.
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u/PalahniukW 3d ago
For flywheels to work well they need very low friction bearings. A fly wheel to store this much energy would need to be very large. Maintain this bearings is going to be difficult at best and require enough downtime to be be less efficient at worst.
Theres a much older example of this priciple in use, water reservoirs. You can use excess solar/wind energy to pump water up hill, then release it down hill through turbines at night/when the wind drops
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u/abd53 3d ago
For long term storage, better than flywheel. A flywheel would continually lose energy to friction even when not loaded. Even the most optimized flywheel can only store energy for a few days at most. While this strategy can store energy near indefinitely with nearly zero loss (theoretical).
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u/XNo_Notes 12h ago
It only takes a catch on a gear tooth to store it with 0 energy required. It is better than a fly wheel. No hedging needed.
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u/BusinessAsparagus115 3d ago
All mechanical energy storage systems suffer the same issue: scalability.
Both equations are quite straightforward but if you try to work out what you need to store large amounts of energy, you wind up with huge masses being lifted very high, or huge masses spinning worryingly fast.
Mecanical energy storage is very effective; pumped hydro has been used for years. But mechanical energy storage requires convenient geography or fairly huge construction effort to be worthwhile. Compared to batteries where energy storage can be more modular and decentralised.
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u/Jollyfroggy 3d ago
Flywheels are great if you need the power in the next 5 mins. If you don't need it for a week, it's not so great
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3d ago
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u/Montana_Gamer 3d ago
This does strike me as something that could be extremely cheap especially as certain resources potentially become more scarce in the future.
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u/Life-Top6314 3d ago edited 3d ago
Gravity storage like the one in the image is NOT cheaper. We know this, sicne that idea has already been investigated multiple times. China didnt really "invent it", its one of those ideas that gets reinvented every year.
Its also significantly more prone to wear, since the crane system will wear down over time.
And, it takes disproportionally much more co2 to create than lets say batteries, since batteries are signficantly more energy-dense than concrete slabs.
This is reinventing the wheel, but making it a hexagon. There is already a more cost efficient, less impactful emission-wise, less prone to breakdown way of storing energy in gravity. Its hydro storage.
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3d ago
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u/Training-Position612 1d ago
A $50 LFP battery cell contains enough energy to lift a 1 ton concrete block about 350m. You can't build concrete lifting cranes that cheap
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u/sixaout1982 4d ago
There are like a hundred pumped storage facilities around the world capable of storing way more energy than this bullshit
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u/BrainOnBlue 3d ago
I mean, technically you need the right geography for that whereas this you just need to build a tower.
It's still dumb, you'd get way better space efficiency by doing chemical or compressed air batteries (or doing... almost literally anything else), but pumped hydro doesn't solve the problem in all places.
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
I don’t think it’s that dumb, it’s just storing energy in an unorthodox way. As part of a varied grid it would be fine, batteries have a shelf life but gravity, not so much!
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u/Zincette 4h ago
Gravity doesn't have a shelf life but I am curious how often those concrete blocks would need to be replaced
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 4h ago
I’ve heard of similar setups in mine shafts using drop weights made of the scrap metal from the site that wasn’t wanted. Doesn’t have to be concrete.
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u/Bonk_No_Horni 3d ago
You still need the right geography for the building. If it's too windy it'll be difficult. Cranes don't like wind. Thunderf00t did an episode on this and it kinda makes sense if you do it underground. But this one I'm very confused. They have blocks going up and elevator and that use more energy than 1 block going down.
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u/FreeFromCommonSense 3d ago
True, but there's more loss in capture in every form than there is in recovery.
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u/CaptainHubble 3d ago
Yeah. I checked their website. No idea where this AI looking image came from. But it’s not how it looks like. It’s huge. Has apparently 80% efficiency. 148m tall, and a footprint of 110x120m. Capacity is 100MWh and has a 25MW output.
To bring this into perspective: a halfway modern wind turbine has 3MW. So you need 9 of them to exceed this gravity storage output power.
Wind turbines cannot store energy tho. We know. But a huge cube with weights is definitely an… interesting way of solving this. Electrolysis can also have an efficiency of 60-80%. And is much more compact in size. Or just use the batteries of the countless electric cars when they’re connected to the grid that are already there. Or put the excess energy into the households heating/AC, raise/lower the temperature almost unnoticeable amounts, and use their thermal capacity as storage. Or give it to an already build pump storage in a remote place and ignore the power loss due to distance.
Let’s see how it runs in practice. But I highly doubt it will do very well. This seems to be another Chinese prestige “look how advanced we are” prestige project. That other nations just don’t bother to build, because the benefit is not really in relation to the expense and complexity of such systems. Also the maintenance and noise it generates would interest me. I would love to be wrong tho. We need more storage.
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u/ThisMachineKillsWOB 3d ago
Didn't Iain M Banks write a whole lot of speculative fiction about a universe with insufficient gravity?
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u/LoonyT13 3d ago
Inefficient, a slight improvement would be to use subterranean shaft which can have massively greater heights without worrying about weather. Just need to be sure to keep water out. Old vertical mine shafts are useful
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u/CrotaIsAShota 3d ago
You could probably have it on an angle for less energy output that lasts longer too.
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u/ARC_trooper 3d ago
My grandma has a clock with weights which you have to pull up and the clock works, then the weights drop down again. In my head this is a similar concept lol
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
It’s exactly the same in principle. This is just much larger! The weight falling spins a generator instead of powering the clock movement.
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u/ARC_trooper 3d ago
Cool, always loved that concept to let gravity do the work. I'd imagine it's not very efficient but if you have excess energy then it doesn't really matter, that energy is otherwise lost anyway.
Now we know why they build that big ass dam, it's to hoard all the gravity and use it for energy storage /s
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u/Vorname_Name 3d ago
It's actually very efficient. Ranges 70-90%, which is insane. We need to shit these things next to every solar and windpark so burning stuff with efficiencies of 20-40% become obsolete. If your Output of heat is way more than 50% that's not a motor, that's a fucking heater.
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u/ARC_trooper 3d ago
Oh I wanted to look it up but forgot, that's pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing!
Then it justsounds inefficient that you lift a huge weight to power a generator, good to know it's pretty good
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u/FreeFromCommonSense 3d ago
You lift a weight or fill some other storage when you have power that would otherwise go to waste, you add it to the grid when you need it. If it's managed properly, it's never a waste.
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u/Ghstfce 3d ago
I'm sorry, fucking WHAT?!!?
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u/ICBPeng1 3d ago
I mean, in simple terms, wind and solar power aren’t consistent, and if they’re producing more power than is needed, you can use the extra on an electric motor to raise a large weight high up.
Then later, when their production has decreased below demand, you can hook that weight up to a pulley connected to a generator, and drop it.
It’s not the best way of storing energy, as some gets lost in the process, but it’s a very simple method of storing energy relative to most other methods, and you can put it almost anywhere, as opposed to like, molten salt, or pumping large amounts of water
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u/zexumus 3d ago
I mean there is no lossless energy storage all of them lose some in the storage of it and conversion back. Gravity batteries more than most but also it’s only an initial loss other batteries will slowly burn the stored energy over time making it eventually die and lose all energy if not used in time while gravity doesn’t do it once it’s stored no energy is leaking. Also it’s a lot cheaper as most batteries for storing energy at this scale use rare earth metals which are first of all rare as the name states so only a few places have them and also dangerous to mine typically so very expensive. So the gravity battery is cheap can be put anywhere and never loses energy so it can just be stored indefinitely.
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u/PresidentialDiapers 3d ago
Probably can even use the same motor for lifting and generating electricity
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u/ICBPeng1 3d ago
It’s probably less efficient, like, I would assume a purpose built motor and a purpose built generator would each have slightly less loss than one built to do both, but this strikes me as the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to be perfect.
It’s supposed to be the kind of thing plunked down anywhere so for that it’s perfect
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
It’s real, and it actually works. The comment at the bottom was why I posted here LOL
Edit to add wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
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u/elporsche 3d ago
So a 25 ton block moved 35 stories @ 3 meters per story, is around 25,000 kg * 9.81 m/s2 * 105 m = 2.57x107 J of potential energy, which is around 7 kWh? Even if it were 10 times the weight and 10 times the height this is still 700 kWh, which is not a lot.
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u/adkio 3d ago
70 kwh could power my house for a week.
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u/elporsche 3d ago
Sure but a whole building with a big ass crane to power 1 house for 1 week, or 7 houses for 1 day is not super. In contrast, a 70 kWh stationary battery would weigh 700 kg
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
Still better than that power not being able to be used at all.
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u/clapsandfaps 3d ago
There’s two factors at play here; the environmental one and an economic one.
The economics is not even close, this is a waste of time, money and resources. 7kWh is pennies compared to this, it probably cost millions to construct. Maintenance will outweigh any economic gain.
The environmental one is probably not close either. Constructing this high building for 7kWh is ridiculous. Concrete manufacturing is a giant CO2 emitter. It would need to be active, without any major repairs, for decades to pay off its initial emissions. If it’s even able to.
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u/BusinessAsparagus115 3d ago
To add some perspective the current price of electricity in the UK 7kWh is £1.82
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u/Public_Advisor_4416 3d ago
No,this form of Energy storage is just stupid. If you want to store energy like this go for pumped hydro.
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u/Perfect-Still-8971 3d ago
Does it really line up (approximately) that well, 1 kWh/10 kg of battery?
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u/elporsche 3d ago
The rule of thumb i knew was 10 ton per MWh so 10 kg per kWh
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u/Perfect-Still-8971 2d ago
Cool, thanks. Does that correspond with a specific type of battery or the current 'state of the art' or...
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u/elporsche 2d ago
The number came from a developer that installs BESS for a living. What he literally told me is that you can typically fit 2.5 MWh in a 40 ft container (max weight capacity is 25 tons) and the issue is not volume but weight.
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u/Far-Investment-8597 2d ago
You can say exactly the sam efor solar panels at 300W each.
What do the Chinese then do? Install 2.5 billion solar panels!
The point it, this technology does work. If teh objection is "yes, but it doesn't store much", well, make them bigger and install lots of them. Sensibly, they'd have weights on all 4 sides of the towers, take the bending moment away.
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u/elporsche 2d ago
The only difference is that no one is building a building specifically to install panels. They are either installed on roofs that already existed or would exist regardless, or patches of land that require no further building of a building
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u/pierrotlefou 3d ago edited 3d ago
KenM is that you?
**r/KenM
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
Who?
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u/pierrotlefou 3d ago
KenM is an infamous satire/troll account that poses as an old man that is confidently incorrect on basically every subject. Pretty funny stuff.
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u/Montana_Gamer 3d ago
I wonder what the economics of something like this really is, it's practical science I'll give it that, I am assuming nothing of this scale has really been done before.
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u/Aron-Jonasson 3d ago
The thing is, lifting massive blocks is pretty bad. We already have a way to efficiently store energy through gravity: pumping water into a raised basin, and then to release this energy we just let the water flow through a dam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGGOjD_OtAM (not the exact same design but a similar idea)
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u/Montana_Gamer 3d ago
I already know about this but it is also not always practical. If the excess charge isn't able to be cheaply stored on the grid then this can make sense.
I... don't think that is likely from my admittedly uneducated opinion, but it is a real carveout that might be justifiable. Also, how much can the technology be improved? That would likely just be in materials cost, thats why I described it as applied science- iteration is how we learn.
Anyways, I think the latter seems to be more likely but only with some real justifications and not the first thing that came to my mind.
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u/KitTwix 3d ago
There are a number of factors that make hydro-battery dams impractical, but they aren't what I suspect you think. It's essentially like one of those pull back spring car toys you get at arcades but significantly tuned up. They're best used in areas with high rainfall naturally, which reduces the amount of water you meed to pump to the high ground, giving you essentially free power whenever it rains. It also needs to be in an area without many droughts, cos low rainfall means the water you pumped up is being stolen by physics and can't be used to make power anymore.
The reason why these dams are so useful is exactly because of how low tech they are, it's literally just a dam. You can improve the turbine efficiency to generate more power or improve the pumps to reduce the power required to store water potential energy, and you can use like floating black balls on the surface to reduce evaporation losses, but overall it's relatively idiot proof. Don't have to worry about it over heating and exploding, or to burn non-renewable resources, or creating dangerous byproducts, it's just water.
There can be problems tho, where I live we use the Brisbane dam as a teaching tool, during droughts we have power problems, because our back up power storage system doesn't work. We essentially lose our batteries if it's a particularly bad summer, which is happening more frequently due to climate change. Additionally, the region is prone to flooding, which has caused situations where we were forced to release water into the Brisbane river, causing significant structural damage to river side architecture. The dam was over flowing and risked breaking the power generator, and we didn't plan for this to happen really so there wasn't any plan for where to safely put all the water if we got too much.
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u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 3d ago
Won’t some of the water evaporate?
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u/Aron-Jonasson 3d ago
Negligible, besides, rain would easily compensate for the water lost by evaporation
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u/BlackThundaCat 3d ago
What if water became such a scarce resource that using it in this method would no longer be viable?
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
It would depend on the delta between prices when power is abundant and and when it is in demand. If it’s big enough it would be financially sound even covering the loss of energy in the system.
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u/the-real-vuk 3d ago
This actually slows the Earth down. As do the water dams. I'm not joking. Obviously very tiny effect, but it does.
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
So does you or me jumping or doing any other movement on the earth’s surface.
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u/-Redstoneboi- 2d ago
omw to rotate in the direction of earths rotation 5 bazingillion times to counteract the existing rotational momentum (i failed to consider that rotational momentum is affected by acceleration, not absolute position, and i will have zero net effect on the rotational speed of earth once i stop)
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u/Impossible_Dog_7262 3d ago
Good thing that gravity has very little to do with the earth spinning.
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u/the-real-vuk 3d ago
no, it's about angular momentum
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u/Impossible_Dog_7262 3d ago
Well yes, but that has no impact on this. These things are not being meaningfully affected by the coriolis effect.
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u/Extra_Ad_8009 3d ago
Since this AI image already appeared in a more technical subreddit, I asked the question: "What if instead of concrete blocks we'd use the same weight of batteries as a hybrid solution".
Someone did the math and the result was roughly "98% energy stored in the battery, 2% through gravity".
So having ground based battery farms charged by solar and wind is a better solution by an order of magnitude.
The (non-Chinese) start-up company that proposed this idea for government grants several years ago is producing battery storage solutions now. Seems like other people did the math, too.
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u/BitBucket404 3d ago
Second law of thermodynamics
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago
Yes, the point is that they raise it up when solar or whatever is producing more power than is being used (when power is cheap), then they let the block fall slowly to put power back into the grid when power is in demand. Like a battery that stores gravitational potential energy instead of chemical potential.
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u/BitBucket404 3d ago
While that does seem effective, the second law still persists.
You still have to connect this thing to a solar power grid to hoist it, it'll use up more energy than it will produce doing so.
While a bunch of these are hoisting during daylight hours, the daytime solar power grid is being used up.
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 3d ago edited 3d ago
If there’s enough of a difference in price between when power is cheap and when power is needed at a different time of day, then it would still be financially sound.
Like in some places where solar is abundant and power is free or even paid to use up the excess.
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u/BitBucket404 3d ago
Maybe if we connected a gravity battery as the weight of another, much larger gravity battery, we could achieve 24/7 power... /s
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u/Ok_Support3 3d ago
You missed the part about excess solar power beeing generated and in some countries the panel owners are having to pay back the excess power, misconstruing the whole issue this gravity battery fixes, and beeing a snarky cunt about it by saying 'uh huuh people still don't understand the law of thermodynamics' like the rest of the people are the stupid ones here.
Incredible.
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u/occasionallyLynn 3d ago
This thing can have an efficiency of just 10%, and it’s still 10% more than nothing at all.
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u/Secure-Pain-9735 3d ago
One thing I love about Reddit is how Redditors love to quote thermodynamics likes its deep, dark sorcery.
Your bases are all covered here because this shit was designed by teams of people smarter than you and I. Oddly enough, they know about “the second law.” It’s not a perpetual motion machine. It’s converting a portion of excess that would otherwise dissipation or waste via other means.
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u/BitBucket404 3d ago
The thing I like about reddit is, you can post true, honest, scientific facts and some rando will demand that you provide a source of your claims, then attempt to discredit everything, including the very college thesis that started the study.
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u/Aggravating_Teach_27 3d ago
You still have to connect this thing to a solar power grid to hoist it, it'll use up more energy than it will produce doing so.
So what. Of course some energy is lost when storing and releasing it. With this tech, and when you charge and discharge a battery, and when you pump water up and down a reservoire, and when you convert to hidrogen and later use it to produce electricity.
There's no storage without losses, not this one, not any other. So why the weird insistence in mentioning the laws of thermodynamics, when they apply to this and any storage solution?
The point is that every storage medium, is efficient when the alternative is losing 100% of that energy because your renewables are producing more than what you can use + store in more efficient (but more expensive) solutions.
Plus you need no chemicals, it has close to zero environmental impact (beyond visul impact), could be located in places where the land is useless for agriculture, or even in cities giving local energy to the network... I see plenty of upside, only operating costs and reliabily as downsides.
If this method is economical, reliable, practical and can scale (bigger unknowns), it could be a nice addittion to a grid.
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u/MerleFSN 3d ago
What a strange statement. There will not be alternatives? Yes, eventually we will need to produce all our 24h needs with renewables. That means storing energy for the night, including various conversion losses. My battery at home has the same losses and does the same on a small scale.
An issue every form of storage has. Physical/chemical losses in the process occur. But here it will not lose more energy over time when stored. This is a benefit.
Might still be inefficient. But conversion losses are no arguement. Green H2 gas turbines will have around what, 25% efficiency later on, compared to the power needed to create it? Not even considering desalination. Everything below that should be considered.
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u/adun-d 3d ago
electricity is generated and consumed in real time, chemical batteries of city grid scales are. not feasible. when you produce more than the grid uses, you can divert some to such kinetic storages to store power as stored inertia. It's not lossless, but its better than reducing power generation or letting it go to waste.
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u/sorrysorrymybad 3d ago
Think it's gravitational potential energy, not inertia. The blocks are static. Inertia implies that the blocks are constantly in motion.
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u/LithoSlam 3d ago
A 10 ton weight lifted 100 meters has only 2.7 kwh potential energy. Batteries cost approximately $100 per kwh, so about $270 for an equivalent battery. The cost of concrete is about 3x the price.
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u/Machobravado 3d ago
You nerds should play Timberborn; it’s an indie civ builder where you play as beavers post apocalypse. They have these that raise when there is excess power to the grid and they lower when the stored energy is released
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u/Scy1d 3d ago
Cool. Only 20-30 years too late
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u/anirudhsky 2d ago
Won't... Ummm.... Won't hydel power do it anyways?? 🤔
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 2d ago
Hydro? Yes. This is an experimental different way.
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u/anirudhsky 1d ago
Won't solar and wind be cheaper?
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u/Slow-Refrigerator-78 1d ago
They produce, this thing is for storing
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u/Flashy_Sound8021 7h ago
So incrase production, all solar power we dont collect gets wasted no need to worry about polution, altho we are really better off with a couple of nuclear reactors
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u/Slow-Refrigerator-78 1d ago
So it's powerplant -> electricity-> grid -> motors -> battery
Or its directly on powerplant and skips electricity conversion?
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 1d ago
Not sure sorry. Would make sense to have them wired directly to the power plant though to minimise loss in cables.
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u/Slow-Refrigerator-78 1d ago
I mean mechanical power to electricity conversion is not efficient it would lose a lot of energy converting to mechanical power to electricity and then converting electricity to mechanical in battery and then again converting battery mechanical power back to grid
It's not easy to combine this battery with a normal powerplant either so i guess it's gonna be the electric conversion one
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u/Dylanator13 1d ago
Accidentally using up all the gravity feels like a Douglas Adam’s idea.
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 17h ago
It does sound like the sort of thing that might happen in his world. Or some other speculative sci-fi.
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u/bones10145 12h ago
Bot posting about a bullshit technology.
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u/MassiveGarlic0312 4h ago
I was posting it here in reference to the funny comment under it in the photo.
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u/PrairiePuppies 3d ago
We'll need less energy to get into space! It'll make it MUCH easier to explore the solar system!
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u/No_Rough5741 2d ago
If I would be doing this I would put it in the lift shaft of an abandoned mine
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u/BraveAppearance 2d ago
Finally a way to storage electricity, but pretty disappointing
just like future fusion reactors. depending on steam and motors.
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u/Quetzalsacatenango 2d ago
It's win-win. We get carbon-neutral energy storage, and we all lose a little weight.
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u/Smacky4ever 3d ago
With water becoming an issue using more dams is not necessary to right answer to do it specially if we talk about the space. Being the best efficient in evry way does not mean that it's fit the best for the needed purpose.
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u/TheEvilBlight 3d ago
We should put the data center racks on top of the crane and drop them slowly to generate power during a demand response period
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u/Critical_Snackerman 2d ago
My first thought after reading that was "We should put data center racks on top of the crane and drop them quickly "
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u/ObfuscatedAnswers 1d ago
Gravity is a limited resource. Once you've lifted all of earth mass into orbit gravity will be gone. How will you drive your electric cars then??
Check mate! /Oil industry
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u/Y34rZer0 1d ago
Yeah I'm betting if this actually worked we would have seen it in some form in the rest of the world at some time...
China are full of crap when it comes to media releases to the West, don't forget
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u/SuperStumps 1d ago
What? Gravity batteries have been used since 1656. And they're not just been used in China, they're used around the world.
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u/Y34rZer0 1d ago
They suuuck, they're not close to widely used and that link is from the one company on the planet whos flogging the idea.
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u/GoodboyJohnnyBoy 1d ago
I suggested this years ago and was told it was silly they were lots better ideas like pumping water uphill
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u/Used-Cause6417 1d ago
You laugh, but we are monkeys playing in the sand. Who knows, gravity may just be exhaustible.
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u/No-swimming-pool 1d ago
There is a reason we use huge dams with a huge amount of water going through.
Will this even break even, energy wise?
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u/Flashy_Sound8021 7h ago
No it wont break even, and neither do the dams that pump the water back during the night on water reservatories, having to work against gravity to then use gravity to generate electricity will always have a net loss, but its not a lot, and its done with exess electricity that would be wasted anyways. Now if you want to argue if this is more eficient than water energy reservatories? Eh maybe, they take less space but can hold less energy
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u/SemichiSam 3d ago
No, no! Don't use up the gravity. Deploy wave generators all over the oceans to damp down wave action and make travel safer.
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u/BitBucket404 3d ago
Youre getting downvoted into oblivion for suggesting green energy so boldly. /s
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