syllable_studio

9 ms·

31.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Yeah, this is another promising one. The other disadvantage with that design is that the weight of the water is actually working against them. So if their rock/concrete is about 2.5x heavier than water, the weight of water is subtracte
32.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
corrected, thank you :)
33.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Yeah, very similar. The main reason is that you can get about 10x more height underground. You can dig about a mile deep. An Energy Vault tower is about 500 feet tall. And as mentioned below in other comments, adding more height gives you m
34.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
You're thinking too small though ;). You can dig a mile deep. And you can lift enormous weights. As comments show below. Gravity is weak, but cheap. It can scale up to provide 1 GW of storage - enough to balance the load of an entire l
35.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Yeah, I did a feasibility study on underground pumped hydro which you can find here: https://www.terramenthq.com/uphs/ UPHS has never been fully built to my knowledge, but it's been well studied and quite a few pr
36.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
This is probably a joke, but it's not so crazy. Many designs are combining one or more of these.
37.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Haha, thanks. It's a little of both of course. You have to be a bit of a lunatic to think you can do these things. But someone's got to get it done.
38.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Hey andbberger, Yeah, we're _definitely_ assuming that g is constant for all elevations :) There's another thread on this comment page talking about why height is important. Please see this slide in our presentation illustrating
39.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Thanks! - Regarding jams, failures, etc. These should be extremely rare, but in the event, each unit is designed to "disengage" if needed so it's just dumb weight, and modules adjacent to it will be designed to lift it. Then
40.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Quite a few comments question the cost of digging -- which is understandable. But the context to remember is that these are huge infrastructure investments that will return revenue from that investment over 20-100 years with little maintena
41.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Haha well, 70 of those slides are appendix slides. The way our design works, the modular weights are autonomous on a track. So we don't have huge cranes above ground. We just have a track above ground that also runs a mile. That track
42.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Terrament is patenting a number of different designs which enable us to maximize both height and weight to nearly 100% of a mine shaft. When you think about the physics of suspending thousands of tons inside a mile deep hole, the devil is i
43.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Yeah, compressed air is a very viable and promising solution. It does have efficiency trade-offs as you mention though. And typical compressed air designs still use fossil fuels in the compression process. There are some new designs I'
44.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Gravity is weak, but it's cheap. It is indeed surprising, but plenty of research shows that the levelized cost of gravity storage is cheaper than Li-ion batteries - even if you assume that Li-ion will get 4x cheaper in the next 20 year
45.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Damn, you're right - thanks spot5010. I thought that I could use "exponential" colloquially and it would still be accurate enough (because quadratic scaling is even more esoteric to most people). But thanks for the callout, y
46.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Yeah, this would be similar to what energyvault.com is doing. I love that energy vault got funding ($110M) and is pushing the industry forward. But IMHO, I ultimately don't think they will be able to compete with underground gravity st
47.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
The issue with using natural landscapes is that it limits your height. And adding more height is ~exponentially~ (edit: quadratically) better than just adding more installations with an equivalent total height. (You can dig about a mile dee
48.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
I can see why you'd suspect that. But it turns out that the oil and gas industry has 100 years of precedent demonstrating how to build such shafts into bedrock. Flooding and earthquakes are all real concerns, but we have well-proven so
49.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
The nuclear debate is interesting, with valid talking points on both sides. But even if nuclear were safer and cheaper than wind+solar+storage (which it isn't), it would take decades to build. We might not have that much time. Climate
50.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
You can in fact! Pumped hydro is already the cheapest form of energy storage - about 95% of all energy storage is pumped hydro. We can't build more pumped hydro because it's not feasible to build enough dams. (We've used up t
51.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Yeah, and as I mention above, the key thing is height. You can build 10x taller underground than above ground. And that gives you 10x more potential energy for the same amount of weight.
52.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
It is worth it to dig a hole! Because building one tall tower is ~exponentially~ (edit: quadratically) better than building multiple shorter ones side by side with the same combined height. You can dig a mile deep which is about 10 times ta
53.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Quite a few similar companies are looking at compacted earth mixed with concrete to reuse some dirt and rock that is excavated. See also https://energyvault.com/
54.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
I love Gravitricity. I'm the founder of a similar startup called Terrament. We are also building gravity storage underground, but our patents are extending this idea to use autonomous, modular weights. This enables us to maximize both
55.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
I found that these two articles provide some good context about YAM and yield farming. It seems like there is some messy, but really interesting experimentation happening in DeFi right now. https://www.coindesk.com/defi-dege
56.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Can Proteus be cut by Proteus?
57.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Hacker News, you can't hide from this important topic about a lack of diversity. We need to discuss this and fix it as a community. https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1277616493149196293
58.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
That is a toxic reason to flag something! You can't just run from an important topic because some people will troll it.
59.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
Are you serious? Was this article really just FLAGGED? Was it flagged just because the article mildly criticises Hacker News and it's moderators for not having enough diversity?
60.
by syllable_studio 6y ago
It would not surprise me if the mods shut down this thread. But I question whether they should. And I question whether they would shut it down if they had more diversity. Why should I not be able to upvote someone's comment just becaus

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