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Gravity batteries in abandoned mines could power the whole planet
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y agoWe already have gravity batteries. They're called hydro-electric dams.
- vardump 4y agoSure, but hydro is a rather limited resource. This could allegedly scale way further.
- JonChesterfield 4y agoOn the basis that there are more mines than hills with lakes on?
- RGamma 4y agoThere's approaches with compressed liquids, i.e. hydraulically lifting mass. These would be more compact and could be built almost anywhere. See e.g. https://heindl-energy.com/ https://heindl-energy.com/
- airbreather 4y agoonly if they are infinitely deep - it is just storage, they create no power, just shuffle it around
- humanizersequel 4y agoSure, but we can incrementally 'charge' a battery like this using small amounts of excess power from irregular sources — solar being the obvious example — and tap it later in a controlled way.
- Kirby64 4y agoStorage is going to become (and, already is in many ways) an important part of the power generation of the future. If solar and wind are the majority of renewables, then there needs to be a way to store power cost-effectively to manage peaks, since Solar/Wind does not correlate with usage. Article's title is perhaps misleading, but the subhead clarifies its for energy storage in the article.
- JonChesterfield 4y agoThis is a study that moved sand up and down in a mine. It makes no attempt to generate power (assumes an excess of power from somewhere else to waste in the mine), and the article doesn't cover why you'd chose sand instead of water. Water being much easier to move around and can be sent through a turbine on the way down. So taking the design as described by techspot, this is a ridiculous non-starter with a grossly inaccurate title.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoYup, people keep promoting this stupid idea. You simply need too much mass to store power economically this way. We already do it on a small scale--pumped hydro--but it's simply impractical for anything more than a peaking plant.
- youngtaff 4y agoAlso ignores the fact than mines tend to fill up with water over time so you need to keep pumping them out
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoHere's a more fun headline: Himalayas have 100x storage capacity for gravity battery as we'll ever need! The design of the mine seems inefficient. Why not use water and a pool on top? The water can use the side tunnels and store more. Sand sounds like a dumb idea.
- pcdoodle 4y agoImagine the maintenance challenges of a system like this. Why are there box trucks in the "lower storage"? How about a few apartments too? This is "Solar Freaking Roadways" level thinking.