To make solar power viable, we need a solution for overnight energy storage.
Batteries are complicated.
Do you know what isn’t? Water go up. 
You must log in or register to comment.
It seems like you’d lose a fair bit of energy from powering the pump and from the turbine not capturing 100% but I don’t actually know how it compares to other types of energy storage.
What about a weight and a skyscraper?
Explain.
Freight elevator shaft (boring, no one uses anymore), biiiiiiigggg grand piano, cartoon cat on massive, convoluted, downward-sloping treadmill
Don’t worry he likes it :3
Will his teeth turn into piano keys following the imminent collision? What song will they play?
Unsure of the details, still waiting for my grant to get approved
Ideally we would avoid collisions cuz its unpleasant for everyone involved, especially the cat
Would set it up at the end so he narrowly escapes
Can’t play ragtime on piano teeth anymore, because of woke
The amount of energy stored from raising a very heavy block up is not that much.
About 7kwh if you replaced an elevator with a block of lead in a 10story building
So yeah not much
Make a 2 tier damn where the second hydro plant powers a pump to make the water go all the way to the top
There’s no such thing as free energy; losses due to friction would make this less efficient than the one-tier system
I’m not following.
They literally do this somewhere. There’s a Tom Scott video about it.
They literally do this somewhere. There’s a Tom Scott video about it.
I know it’s a real thing. I assume it isn’t that widespread though.
deleted by creator
Increasingly becoming widespread at larger scales. China spent $2 billion on a 3.6 GW installation with 40 GWh of storage a couple years ago for example
Increasingly becoming widespread at larger scales. China spent $2 billion on a 3.6 GW installation with 40 GWh of storage a couple years ago for example
Austria has 23 of them.
Ausgezeichnet!
We also have more than enough water for it and mountains the problem is there is usually a backlash against building them so it’s not always easy to get them built. A local lake has also experienced a drop in fish population due to the increased sediment that was caused while building. All these solutions are cool but there are always downsides as well don’t expect magic techno fixes for climate change the easiest thing we could do is change our behaviour, but try telling an Austrian they can’t have schnitzel and see what happens, this is all coming from a guilty ex vegetarian.
I’ve heard terf island has one for when everybody puts the kettle on at the same commercial break on the one tv channel they all watch
They should stagger those ads!
just turn the sun on at night sometimes duh
but then the sun would burn out faster
No joke, this was tried in russia with a mirror in space. It worked btw.
I saw that on James Bond
deleted by creator
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I like it, but I like the name “gravity battery” even better.
It’s fine for places that have a lot of water and hills
you can use saltwater for it though, doesn’t need to be fresh water or treated in any way, just a physical medium to make turbine go brrr
Machinery and saltwater generally don’t mix very well. And you’d still need to make a saltwater lake somewhere uphill.
yeah but in this case it’s just a pipe and a turbine it’s gotta make move
And you’d still need to make a saltwater lake somewhere uphill.
water tanks tho
Turbines are precision machines. And if we’re talking utility scale installations here, we want an upper reservoir measured in thousands of cubic meters, not liters.
Saltwater damages turbine blades very fast. Using saltwater would require some very different engineering for the turbine blades, which might not be worth the benefit of being able to use saltwater.
You don’t really need huge volumes of water, a 5GW hydro storage proposal in Australia will require 38 gigalitres, or 0.038 cubic kilometres. At a depth of ten metres, that’s a 2km circle (or rather, two ~1.5km circular reservoirs).
Arizona uses ~8500 gigalitres a year to put that in comparison.
For places without water, what’s wrong with importing a bunch once? Evaporation suppressors exist to help with hotter climates.
You’re probably right about the hills. Building a water tower that can hold an entire lake seems inefficient.
How are you importing an entire lake?
from somewhere import lake
lake.flow()
It’s just that simple!
Use a very long hose.
Truck? 5G? Just let a tiny faucet run a long time? IDK.
Cool and good.
https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/
One thing this shithole country is doing, that is actually good.
Nice. 👍🦘
deleted by creator
I’ve also seen a version of this that uses an electric locomotive that moves a big weight up and down a slope.
Personally I think we should put big weights on pulleys in every high rise, like a grandfather clock.
You had me at “locomotive”. Name it Sisyphus.
Personally I think we should put big weights on pulleys in every high rise, like a grandfather clock.
How big? Seems like you would need quite a bit of weight to store any useful amount. Using this calculator: https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/physics/gravitational-potential.php and assuming my values are right, if you had something the size of a bus (16,000 kg) pulled up through something as tall as the Empire State Building (380 m roof height), you’d get about 16.56 kWh, which isn’t all that much. I think a typical EV battery size is about 40 kWh in comparison. With hydro storage on the other hand, you can store a shit ton of water in a reservoir without any major constraints besides the overall size, which is massive.
Plus side if youre in a rainy region you get extra energy
That’s a good idea. They already have shafts that have the capacity for big weights as well
Water is overwhelmingly easier to move up and down, and you need a lot of mass to make it viable.
Could the weight be integrated with a tuned mass damper?
How To Make Buildings Into Batteries
That link isn’t working for me:
Got error: “Sign in to confirm that you’re not a bot”
Edit: is it this one? https://youtu.be/oCv3ygvEjFo
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Honestly, one of the better ways ecologically to store energy instead of ripping apart the earth to get rare elements for batteries. But I do also like flywheels, lets just store energy in flywheels.
It’s a big battery. Useful in all cases.
“Pumpspeicherkraftwerk” in German… you are welcome.
kraftwerk
🤖 🔊🤖 🔊
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
There’s also a version of this where you divert water at a regular hydro plant into a storage canal. It still uses pumps, but it doesn’t need a separate turbine and a mountain.
