3 ms·

I'm interested in raised weight hydraulic accumulators and their potential for smoothing out peaks and troughs in the production of renewable energy. German Pr

• dredmorbius 11y ago
  The difference between force accumulation and energy storage is ... that gravitational potential energy just doesn't give you that much. The practical instanciation of your idea would be pumped-storage hydro. Another avenue is compressed-air energy storage (CAES). Here the problem is Boyle's Law: compressing a gas heats it. Over time, that heat will leak out through containment walls (even in underground spent gas field storage). Releasing the gas cools it, to the point that icing over of equipment is a problem. One solution is to introduce a natural gas (or biogas) jet to the release stream, with additional heat of combustion not for energy so much as to prevent icing. This scales in theory, though it's still a tad complicated.
  • g8oz 11y ago
    >>"..that gravitational potential energy just doesn't give you that much" To that point I'll respond with a quote from Hendl's site: A storage with a radius of 250 meters could store 124 GWh, which would correspond to the worldwide storage capacity of all pumped storage power stations. http://www.heindl-energy.com/hydraulic-rock-storage/idea-function.html http://www.heindl-energy.com/hydraulic-rock-storage/idea-fun...
    • dredmorbius 11y ago
      Interesting, though I'm rather suspicious ths would work as stated.