It's not just that the journalists are technically illiterate. It's also that the people making these claims are trying to deceive. You needs lakes of water to

It's not just that the journalists are technically illiterate. It's also that the people making these claims are trying to deceive. You needs lakes of water to have enough mass to make gravity batteries practical. Those are called pumped-hydro. Anything talking about dropping heavy things is probably about 6 orders or magnitude too small and a scam to get government funding.