This is awesome. I invented a similar thing in my head years ago. I was excited when I saw "Energy Vault" start up and use that concept, but I didn't like that it's large towers with complex crane systems. They take up a lot of space, they're complex, they're potentially dangerous in a natural disaster situation, and, to be honest, they're an eyesore. I thought an underground system, although having its own set of problems, would be more effective and safe. And now this company came up with it! Very cool
if left alone for decades, batteries will degrade an will break. if left alone for decades, a large rock will still be on top the platform you left it with the same potential energy
There is not enough power that can be stored in that system compared to the price of the project. 100 tons of weight lifted 100meters up stores just 27kWh that is with 100% efficiency that is impossible because you lose some energy when using electric engine to lift, to transfer energy and due to friction. So how much is it to set it up with 100m deep hole and lift + engine to pick up 100 tons of weight?
Wow, thank you for this presentation. I'm staggered you only have a few hundred subs for such a well informed and professionally delivered subject matter. What else can I say but LIKED and SUBSCRIBED!
How many vertical mineshafts are there? And to what depth? Also, if this system could be 80% efficient, there would be a gravity storage system everywhere, we would even dig new holes for them. An efficiency of 30-40% is much more realistic. There are such systems in place using water, and tons of it, the storage lake's capacity is millions of cubic meters, how much energy do they want to store in this weights? That´s the problem when you don´t want to bother your viewers with math. This storage uses potential energy to store the power, if you would have bothered us with math you would have seen that potential energy always is dependent on mass and height, actually, in simple form it is E(pot) = m * g * h. m is the mass of the weight in kilogram, according to the webpage of gravitricity a maximum of 12000 metric tons (pretty unbelievable, but let´s go with it), which is still nothing compared to water storage, h is the depth of the vertical mineshaft, which are generally pretty rare, in Europe I know of less than 10 of them going deeper than a few hundred meters, and g is gravity. The result is measured in Nm. So 12000 tons, are 12,000,000 kg, earth gravity is 9.81, the depth of the shaft is 300m = 35.316 billion Nm. 1,000,000 Nm is 0.2778 KWh, so the whole system, at 100% efficiency would produce 9810.7848 KWh so about 90% of the average US household need for a year. It would be able to power 330 households for a day or roughly 7000 households for an hour. Nowhere close to the 65000 households they claim on their website. Also, there are logistical problems. Where do they produce those weights? How do they transport those 500-ton weights to the abandoned mining shafts? Mining shafts tend to be in remote locations, where ever the ore has been, normally they do not sit conveniently near to a town. What cranes do they want to use to lift the weights from whatever means of transport they are envisioning into the shaft? Cranes that are able to lift 500 tons are pretty rare and they need a lot of space. If they are going to dig their own holes because you would need them close to the location where the power is produced or consumed, how do they solve the problem with contaminating underground water? And how will they solve the problem of underground water breaking into the shafts? They claim that those systems will last for 50 years without degradation, I don´t know what exactly they are talking about, the hole, the weights? Because they simply can´t be talking about the electric engines or the steel cables, those parts will not last anywhere close to 50 years. And as a last point, what exactly will those laid-off miners do at those facilities? Watch the weight going up and down? How many miners will you need for this job?
Approached the UK Government years ago to use disused mine shafts and inclines in South Wales. They rejected the idea. Could also be used to store energy in lift shafts of tall buildings at night when they are not used.
Yep, this is the problem with big projects. Needs a lot of investment and govt approvals. But if the system is so efficient, it always could be built at small scale. Let say at some remote farm. I think is not hard to find an scrapped bridge crane, to lift o ton to about 6 meters you need about an kw. So for the equivalent of an powerwall you need to raise ten tonnes two stories high. Can this be built cheaper than the powerwall?
Elevator shafts is not feasible. The density of energy stored is low. The building will be able to store just few watts/h. One ton on top of the highest building in the world will store only 2 Kw/h
@@kuriouskoala @Kurious Koala but it doesn't work from an energy-return or economic point of view. Would have been better if you broke down the figures of energy created and the mass needed to generate that power. Mine shafts are small, often not straight and at most a few hundred meters deep. One ton dropped 1km only produces 2.5kw, and that's without taking into account losses from the machinery, friction, etc. Sadly it's not feesable
If you look a bit deeper into it, you realise that it's a maintenance nightmare using weights and cables for energy storage. The first one isn't scalable at all. You a cant power cities if u only have a limited amount of mineshafts, with limited diameter and depth if the hole. Especially the energy vault one with the cranes, is unfortunately idiotic! Cranes don't work when it's even a little bit windy! So u can't use it on windy days. Every time u stack a weight on top of each other, u loose potential energy storage capacity with each block. Remember the bigger the height difference the bigger the stored energy, but if u stack those weights on top of each other, you lose energy every time you do so. The wear and tear of the blocks, the crane and cables themselves are a nightmare if it runs 24/7. Gravity based energy storage system that existed for over hundred years and proven to be reliable are water dams. New storage systems with potential are compressed (liquified) air, flow batteries and lithium ion batteries. Which are all scalable, weather and location independent. Energy storage systems which rely heavily on location and weather are useless. Energy vault u have to shut down the cranes on windy days, and not every country have mineshafts. Even if u have mineshafts most of them aren't nearby the power plants or even the power grid u try to store energy from. There are also solar thermal systems with molten salt storage systems which can run steam engines even during the night (molten salt stays hot for a very long time, several hours ). Scientists are developing super capacitors which would have higher energy storage capacity and response time then lithium ion batteries.
Reasonable thinking. And I agree that energy vault looks sketchy, but some of the other problems you pointed are just technical problems waiting to be solved. You mentioned not enough mine shafts. I always thought, so, since millennia we dug out mines to use only once, to extract the ore and then leave it there. And the cost was covered. What about digging new shafts and using them for millennia? Sure, quite an investment. But with hydro is the same. And hydro locations are scarce. you can dig a hole anywhere. Cables wearing out? Everything is wearing out. Molten salt is quite corrosive.And there can be designed different systems. For example the one with tracks. And with this one it can be avoided the issue of towers collapsing. Towers will be actual pyramids, I mean kilometers wide pyramids. So you have 50 layers of rock cubes, and you stack them in a 100 layers. Sure, when fully charged, first you discharge to top layer down 100, and later just 50 layers. So what. This is just a capacity issue. When you charge it you just raise it 50 layers. The only problem is to see how much it costs per kw of energy stored and recovered. The big advantage is there is no need for expensive materials. Only rocks. And the steel and copper needed in any other electric industrial toy.
@@bleuvert7698 with what price? Cranes all over the world use cables too. but when used for high power, may prove too expensive. Like batteries too. You do not care about the price for your toys and gadgets, but when you put them in cars, it hurts. To put them to balance the grid hurts more. The same with cables.
@@ehombane Digging out mine shaft costs too much money. If you do that the system can not compete with other systems. That's why they propose to use already existing mine shafts in this video in the first place. Its all a question of price. You could dig a hole in the European alps but it would be nonsensical. the ground is so hard you would need explosives to do so. And if you're not digging for gold or diamonds its just not worth it. You cant dig holes everywhere within a reasonable price. water on the other hand is much easier to store. You could build a water tank on a 3000 feet or 1000 meter mountain and it would store the same amount of energy as you would digging a hole that is 3000feet / 1000 meter deep. You would just need to connect a small hydro plant and the tank with a pipe in a closed system and that's much cheaper to build than a 1k meter deep hole. You have to use existing mine shafts to be cheap enough, so you can still compete with other systems. I'm just critiquing the rarity of still usable old mine shafts. Not the system on itself. The idea is not bad. Many countries just don't have them. If your country has a lot of old mine shafts, lucky you. Congrats! Molten salt is corrosive, sure, but u can use alloys that can withstand the salt without problem, and there a solar power plants that use molten salt without problems for decades by now. You could also use molten aluminum or lead as a medium, that's not the problem. The problem with the energy vault tower isn't the risk of collapse. The bigger problems are the fact that u lose energy if you lower the block down and stack them on the ground. You loose energy, you loose money. It is slow because u have to pick every single block up manually, because there is no AI on this planet right now that could lift the blocks fast and reliable enough. The cranes don't work on windy/stormy days, so you literally cant use them in most of spring and autumn [or fall]. Search for *crane wind collapse* there are plenty of youtube video about that. The materials used aren't cheap. energy vault the company trying to build the tower are using concrete and thick plates, 35 metric tons of it for every single block. Water is literally FREE. By the way, if u make a pyramid instead of a tower, with what super crane would u lift the blocks if its kilometers wide?? There is no crane with an kilometer long crane arm! It would be so much more efficient just to build a tower with a massive elevator shaft. In principle like the mine shaft version but as a tower. But it still would cost so much more to build than all other systems. Look up Thunderf00ts video. He debunks the energy vault. its a bit too sarcastic to my taste. But he explains in depth what's wrong with the energy vault. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NIhCuzxNvv0.html Believe me there other and better energy storage systems. Gas liquification [liquid air batteries], Liquid redox flow batteries, super capacitors, lithium ion batteries, water pump storage systems, thermal storage systems [molten salt, liquid aluminum, lead etc] in combination with stirling engines, even mechanical energy storage systems like flywheels. They all produce and store energy today, right now. And they're getting more and more efficient.
@@damaskilo2665 Sure, I get the idea of returning the investment rapidly, will never make new shafts efficient. But as I said. Mines were dug since millennia, and the cost was covered by the cheap ore retrieved, like salt, coal , so on. And you did not got the idea of the huge pyramid. You do not need a crane bigger than it. A different system, strong enough to lift a block, and mobile, to crawl the edge. You can even make it small enough to move the block only a layer or two, and spiraling will go layer by layer up or down. AI maneuvering blocks? Not at all. With a smart design you do not need even sensors. Have you seen that machine that moves a separating wall among lanes? Today most crops are picked by machines. No AI involved. Yep, concrete blocks is stupid. concrete is expensive. Stone is better, you just cut it. And in process you produce sand. Sand for constructions becomes scarce already. Sure, water is best for storing, but the locations are running out already, and we need two or three order of magnitude more. I know of all other promising technologies, flow, redox, and lately, liquid metal, which got accepted for production. But all require complex technologies, expensive materials. And in the end long distance transport may be the solution,. But at big scale, and long term planning, stone may be the solution. It may take five times more than hydro to build, but the blocks will last 100 times more. And sure, countries like mine, where hydro is producing already a third of electricity, just better planning will solve the issue. But politics ruin this. instead of shutting down coal, and using solar during the day, and wind when it is, and save the water for the night, al renewable is exported. WE paid for it, but we get no return for it, or at least clean air. We still burn coal.
I’m a mech eng. and come from a mining city that has around 150,000 people (Sudbury Ontario) - I’m certain it has several abandoned shafts - it also has a high average wind speed and a relatively high amount of sunshine - might be the perfect spot for this technology - the great thing about it, is it’s very long life and relative simplicity - it isn’t necessary to test it out - it would be dead simple to calculate power output - the generator would be very similar in concept to EV regen systems
Always like to see videos about energy storage concepts. Thanks for posting. As far as mechanical means of storing energy, I have always favored flywheels but they have engineering problems that need to be overcome. Bottom line, the BEST technology is always going to be dependent on the location. Its good to see many options being proposed.
Bentley, conventional steam turbo alternators and hydro alternators already have an inbuilt flywheel in the mass of their rotating componets of a significant amount . This is one reason that they are technically suited to electricla genertaion. Wind and solar do not have this inertia. Incidentally a test to measure this effect was what they were doing at Chernobyl, and the by passing of safety circuits, is why there was an accident there.
@@BubblePuppy. indeed thats why I asked that question about the energy density in another comment... the higher the density the better it is... and I dont know what the energy density of this setup is.. I mean the idea is great.... but what is it energy density and how can that be improved dramatically.
@@thewaytruthandlife energy density = energy that you can generate per volume. So for a very large system, like 20 m3, you can store 2 3 kWh maybe. Batteries with 2 3 kWh storage capacity are smaller than 1 m3. That's why this technology is not very feasible. But maybe for large amounts of energy as in this case, it can be used because of its lower cost than batteries.
What if we combined Flywheel technology and gravitational storage? Like a flywheel system INSIDE the suspended weight? How would that affect the overall energy density?
Nice content, but sort the music volume out, had to turn the speaker up loud to hear you quietly talking and then you blast the into music out so loud could wake people up in the house.
who do I contact to get one installed? im looking into making a smaller scale of my renewable idea and this would help in storing potential energy in my system.
Why not have multiple shafts, weights, and generators? When one of the weights gets to the bottom of its travel, another weight can be released to power the winch to bring it back up, while another one is powering the grid. They all are on rotation, meanwhile there are enough weight shafts on standby if maintenance or repairs need to be done on any. Why have we not done this before?? 🤷♂️
Just asking for your opinion on a different concept of my own that is quite basic. The build can at least be of 2 ultra strong permanent magnets, one above another where the top magnet stays stationary on a plastic* container maybe filled with water while the other is inside that container. Between the top magnet and the container needs to be a very narrow gap for which a light sheet of lead* can easily slide between the magnets just enough to cause the bottom magnet to fall as if it were a delicate power switch that the rise and fall will help* generate more electrical power than it would take to move the lead* sheet in and out of that gap in least frictionless way, maybe levitated by other magnets. The water is basic to prevent damaging and even far too much noise. . In summary... it would be as if the permanent magnets can be switch on and off like electro-magnets. . I tend to come up with a whole lot of various ideas that worked out awesomely, but... not often able to test my ideas out.
They could run two 6" pipes, connected in a 'U' shape down in the hole and put both ends into the control house, and keep it a nice 55 deg. all year round. All it would need is a little fan on one end.
@@ehombane - The guy on the video I saw, who lives in the Arizona desert, says that his place doesn’t get above 85 in the summer or below 40 in the winter. And all he is using is a computer fan blowing air.
@@tubularguynine I know about earthships. Well insulated, the little energy carried by air is enough to compensate. As I said air works for house use. But this is about industrial level.
@@ehombane - Industrial level, it would help cut the edge off, and allow for less energy to heat and cool, plus the bigger the footprint, the more the protected area can thermally stabilize, further cutting the energy needs. My home is on a hill, built on cinder block piers, with from zero crawlspace on one side, to 6 feet on the other, and at just 1,400 sq. Ft., it’s up to 15 deg. warmer or cooler under there than the outside temp.
1 horsepower is the amount of power required 33000 lb at the rate of 1 ft per minute. 1 horsepower equals 746 w. Now if you start doing the math you realize how huge this thing must be to store a pathetically small amount of energy
Just out of curiosity, we talk about gravity batteries because gravity is obvious. But what about pumping air into a container under water and letting the air rise it to the surface? How much energy is needed to pump the air down there vs how much electricity is needed to make hydrogen/oxygen etc because I assume you could just release the air at surface to re-sink it. Or fill it with water at surface easily. So down works easily.. because gravity but also up works because of air... curious if anyone has tried anything like that?
I think to help world hunger is to freeze drying our food enstead of canning or our fresh food, freeze drying from farm to table with a 25 yr. shelf life you'll have less waste no fregeration , and no need of aluminum cans filling up our landfills and less food waste at home because of spoilage
what is the energy density. I know tough question. How to calculate that in such a device. Usually energy densities are very interesting to compare it to other energy sources (like petrol, coal, wood, hydrogen, lithium batteries etc). Thing is the higher it is the better it is.
@@crashoverride5107 you said it right ... some times.. mostly not ! Fact is that people start to see that energy harvesting cost a lot of ground as well and we the ground is used for energy harvesting, nothing can grow... so no the higher energy density a decice is the more effecient the more desirable... so costs can be defined in more than 1 way (money) it can also experessed as loss in green/ nature and that turning point we have reached now that our energy harvesters are taking too much space at the cost of the same nature we try to spare.... I hoipe you are getting the point ???
@@corey3667 on how many square meters ?? or per how many qubic meters energy density... not the power... the power per m^2 or m^3... and the higher that number it is the better it is.....
@@thewaytruthandlife the energy density is the same as for water for the mass given. If you look at volume, then is twice than water. But cable maintenance may be prohibitive. I used to believe in this technology, now not so much. Maybe only with really deep shafts, and some magnetic systems to prevent wear.
They talked about energy conversion from one to another… and to the general public it sounds as wonderful as connecting a generator to a motor, and having a perpetual machine. No mention of energy conversion losses Maintenance of a high energy system Cable material strong enough to lift mountains, yet flexible enough to be wound continually for extended periods. Where’s the Comparative Competing solutions performance & cost comparisons WITH NUMBERS, not happy clappy subjective views. My bet… in 5 years these startups will either still be startups or gone.
From a technical perspective I really like this idea and wish them all the best with their endeavour. Down here in South Africa we have a lot of mines and, no doubt, a large number of old mine shafts that can be well utilized for projects like this one. However, the current ANC regime has racist laws in place like BBBEE (broad based black economic empowerment) programs. This will require Gravitricity to have at least 51% black shareholders in their company here. Good luck to them unless they can find some legal way around that. They will end up with larger holes in their bank account than the holes in our earth.
I'm curious what the efficiency of this system is. You'll never get out 100% of the energy you put into an energy storage system, but you can get close (I think batteries are in the high 90's). So how does this method compare with the others?
why do these things always look like no one's thought for more then a second conceiving them.. because the cranes are at least a poolie for the mine shaft they would need bicycle gears and poulie sytem if they can a compressive gear cyclinder.. it would be much better with a geothermal system that seconds as battery system and that uses blocks to compress some mines untill the pressure can amplify the energy advantages.. also water uses suction that oil geothemal compagnies don't want to see yet.. and you could buid a plant under a city building instead of rock fillingwith big ballon chambers and a realy extensive poulie
Nice idea, but it's easy enough to look up the energy needed to raise 1 tonne 1 meter. It just about gets you a light bulb for an hour if I remember correctly. So you'd need huge weights, massive holes and a collosal number of rigs to equate to a small power station. This rules out dishes mine shafts which are irregular in quantity, size, depth and availability. That said. The main costs to set up are the holes, which when dug could last a thousand years with low maintenance. The sand weights are cheap. The wear and tear on the motors would be less than a turbine and more serviceable. Also, the site is effectively modular so you don't have to shut the whole place down to carry out maintenance. The other significant and potentially prohibitive cost would be the number of motors required. But again, potentially serviceable and economic to maintain over a very long time period, and 100 years should easily be achievable. Perhaps more if they are designed to have worn parts replaced easily.
I just looked it up. I admired this idea for decades but never looked for figures. Largely, A ton at 1 km high can store 2,5KWh. And will take abot 3 to put it back.
@@ehombane exactly. Sadly it's hard to see how this could be a viable solution. Perhaps a field of weighted drops could perhaps be a workable solution in some unique situations, but it's a lot of infrastructure for not a lot of return. I guess this is why stored hydro has always been worth the effort.. Because lakes are a huge and easily manageable mass. A ready made field of weights if you will.
@@islandsedition yes, is hard to see especially when you are not looking. Now, take a look at biggest hydro storage. biggest, hence most efficient. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station. 25gw/h capacity. and the dams volume is 18 million cubic meters. So is almost a cubic meter for every kWh of storage. For my fantasy plan /i dig a km deep, and a km horizontally for storage. Every container size rock module is dug out from the site, so a 10 meters block will require 20 meters of tunnel cut. 10 for storage ten for drop. or 15 if go down 2 km, or use a second horizontally km. Or even less, so the figure goes to close to 10 meters of tunnel for every 20 tonnes block. And that stores 50kwh hour of energy. Now, we go back to the dam. For a kwh, we needed to move 2 tonnes the rock, some kilometers. Now, for a kwh we need to cut out less than half of ton of rock. So, transporting two tonnes is easier than cutting half a ton? I have no idea, but seems comparable for me. Sure, there are a lot of other factors involved, but until you look into it, just guessing will not give an true answer.
I would be concerned about the amount of MWh this system could put out. It seems to me that this could not store as much as pumped hydro and maybe not as much as a utility scale battery system.
maybe air is also one of the porential energy storage by compressing it in a biggest tank. the excess energy will be use to compress air, and when the sun or wind is'nt available, the air that can be compress is release and use it to generate electricity.
It's quite a simple concept, which is great, easy to understand. I would be interested to combine this thinking with some ideas of my own if you would like to collaborate?
Sir, the current state of the world is very bad. The world's climate is deteriorating. I think something needs to be done about it. So I have a new idea for power generation. Some engineers are needed to complete the work. And some investors need. Please help me.
could the cages (elevators) in operating mines be used to generate power for storage from the daily use in operating mines? Sudbury, ON., Canada would be a prime example
Is there a way to store energy as compressed air? It will be easier as less space is needed. But there is one problem. Energy will be dissipated as heat when compressing the air. If we can combine this system with a thermal energy storage system, the same heat energy can be used to expand he air and generate electricity again. Any thoughts about my idea?
Very likely so, complemented by more pumped hydro as well. Molten salt storage in conjunction with solar concentrator power stations also looks to be a viable solution in locations with a lot of sunshine.
There is no point in storage unless there is an excess of renewable genertaion on a consistent and sustained basis. This does not really happen anywhere, except for Norway and it's very large hydro generation capacity. Gravity energy storage is also asynchronous and therefore is not such a good idea overall.
Why does this unworkable idea keep being 'invented' over and over again? This is just like pumped hydro except that it is far less scalable and far more expensive per MWh of capacity. The speaker says it is cost effective because it uses existing mine shafts. The problem is that each shaft will store so little energy that you will need thousands of them to store as much as even a relatively small lake. Even if you had to build an entirely artificial lake by building a huge concrete wall to enclose a flat space it would still be cheaper than the number of 'Gravitricity' shafts that would need to match it. It seems when they come up with these ideas they deliberately avoid working the numbers. It doesn't even need any complex math, just some multiplications and additions. For example, if you were to lower a hundred thousand tones, which is the weight of an entire aircraft carrier, down a 1Km shaft all you would get is roughly 300MWh, or about three times the Tesla battery in Australia. Now try to imagine the machinery you would need to accomplish such a feat for such a relatively trivial amount of energy storage. Even a very small lake 1Km x 1Km and 20 meter deep with a 250 meter drop will give you FIFTY times as much storage capacity and almost the same efficiency. The simple reality is that it is far easier to move huge amounts of water with pumps and turbines than it is to lift and lower huge weights with chains or steel ropes.
Seems like a very good idea. One issue with abandoned mine shafts is they were left for a reason. This could be ore depletion, unstable ground conditions and water inundation. At the very least pumping would be required initially and at worst continuously. Not a problem if you’re using excess energy.
Was this exclusively alternative energy related material? The reason I ask is that you didnt mention fossil fuel energy which is the most prominent source of energy today. Its fine if you want to narrow the focus to renewable energy only, but you didnt make that clear at 2:00 when you mentioned where "our" energy comes from.
Extremely expensive and unefficient....yeah zero downsides. It would be 10 times better to do a geothermal plant if you are going to dig into the earth. People like you are the reason why there will not be fully sustainable energy in our lifetime. You see a pretty 2d rendering and you lose your mind. Do you have any idea how insanely expensive digging into ground is? Also you have any idea how much carbon will all the cement produce to create the weights and the tube?
@@GeneralGreevas Actually, in the report at least, I think it had an efficiency of about 80-90%. Geothermal is a messy solution. It's not just a hole in the ground. You need to build a very complex system to extract the heat. I agree that digging is expensive. This particular solution uses existing mines. But there are equivalent solutions that go up instead of down. Bottom line is the energy needs to be stored somewhere. This is just one option. Not sure why you feel the need to be so cranky. You have your opinion, others have a different opinion. No need to get so heated.
It would not be so efficient, as the height difference is the consideration. You would need a very long slope! Think of a right angle triangle. Opposite against Hypotenuse.
@@kitemanmusic But then again it depends on the location and how much vertical drop is available versus how much horizontal/vertical drop. And some locations perhaps a slope such as 45° might make a lot of sense, Such as if there was already a slope like that in place.
The same motor that lifts is also the generator, three phase motors will generate power when spun. I operated an oxygen plant for USAF. IT HAD AN EXPANSION ENGINE. RAN BY HIGH PRESSURE AIR, AS soon as AIR valve opened it was generating 15 or 20 KW, can't remember which was 40 years ago and it was 20+ years old then. Very simple technology just like gravity storage and elevator technology old and simple to. Electronic controls are improving lots. This is brilliant idea.
If a design i have completed that eleminates newtons law of energy being mathematically makeing wieghts lifted is a waste due to energy expunged to lift that mass to its high point. My design will lift any amount of wieght ot small but millions of tons 4 times a day a remove all energy production 4 times a day 40 ft high and it will never end so unlimited energy production my design can and will do this
Weights run down way too fast unless you regulate the fall through a mechanism. I have my doubts but 60,000 homes powered for one hour sounds pretty good.
The generator creates resistance which causes the weight to fall slower. Have you ever dropped a magnet through a copper tube? The magnet falls slowly, even though it’s not touching the copper. This is because the motion of the magnet through the copper is creating current within the copper which creates magnetic fields which oppose the falling of the magnet. It’s the same underlying concept here.
I get so many people logical thinkers see something clear in there mind but physics wins out everytime. My design is the only 100 percent power extraction from mass moved 4 times a day any amonut of wieght billion tons dont matter i can lift it all 4 times a dayto a hight of 47 ft
There were few prototypes, and yes, even the concept works, the cost part is tricky. I believed too, that it must work. But just did little math, and the truth is the dimensions are insane. Actually the efficiency is the same as for the water for the same mass. For volume, sure is better. but only twice better. So you still need huge mass to store. Water may be not so dense, but comes o its own. To manipulate big rocks is not easy task. With shafts of many kmeters deep the efficiency will increase, but the length of those cables may be a problem. Plus the wear. I have no idea about how much the cables resist. It may be like batteries. For toys, no problem, but for cars, price hurts. For mass storage price is crushing. And cables too. Are good for lifts cranes and ski lifts. But are they good enough for lifting mountains over and over? Bill Gates said once that he toyed with the idea. They tested a ski lift shifting gravel up and down a mountain. And confessed that the system works. But dd not said nothing about financial efficiency. I seems that investing in drug companies is better than investing in gravitational storage. .
@@ehombanetalked about energy conversion from one to another… and to the general public it sounds as wonderful as connecting a generator to a motor, and having a perpetual machine. No mention of energy conversion losses Maintenance of a high energy system Cable material strong enough to lift mountains, yet flexible enough to be wound continually for extended periods. Competing solutions performance & cost comparisons WITH NUMBERS, not happy clappy subjective views. My bet… in 5 years these startups will either still be startups or gone.
@@jschreiber6461 I do not understand you. Maybe my English fails me. It seems that you say that I promote this idea, but actually i said the same thing as you. Please read again. I did not mentioned the losses because loses exists in functional systems too. Hydro loses a third, or maybe a quarter if is recent technology. And, yes my view is subjective and personal. I am a retired old bloke, enjoying the time left till I expire. I am not in charge with saving the world. And yes my previous belief, was that the system must work, according to my knowledge level. But after doing some math, I started to have doubts. But if you really want to pt words in my mouth, I can help you. I can be the advocate of this idea if I want. Of course I will need to leave out vital facts. You doubt the strength of cables. I can counter you with the fact that cables are used since a century ago to lift mountains. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6RiYXI1Tfu4.html 300 tonnes a day. Sure I will leave out that for these systems we need 300 tonnes per second. And why use cables anyway, we can use a paternoster lift. So no more bending, since is actually a chain of cells. I will leave out the mass of such a system and frictions involved. Or we could lift the rocks in a hydraulic mode. Rock cylinders almost fit to the shaft, and water under pressure will lift them. I will leave out the complexity of such a system.. If you want competing solutions you need to come with really heavy pockets. And sure, in 5 years these startups will be still in the same stage. They are already in the same stage since a decade ago.
Energy storage is a loser approach for grid-level scale. Why not use energy stored in uranium atoms (millions of times greater than coal) to provide vast amounts of CO2-free energy? The technology is in widespread use for grid-scale power generation.
Controll systems for nuclear reactors are intentionally limited in how fast power plant can trottle up or trottle down. Combining nuclear and hydropower does work, at least in France.
I think we could harvest energy from e.g. poor Indians by making them turn wheels all day for cup of food. We adopted this model to make iPhones and cheap, even luxury clothing, so why not?
@@douglasrayanderson4546 This is true if both weights are static. What if when a weight gets to the bottom of its shaft, it drops enough poundage to start its counterpart down and itself back up? Some math must be done (and I'm not the one to do it) to determine if a reciprocating system would provide more net energy than two "down only" systems.
This is a terrible idea. This has very little energy storage potential and it's so obvious that I regard this as a scam, not a genuine attempt to make something that will be useful for energy storage.
actually the storage potential is the same as for water per weight, and since stone has double density, has double storage potential per volume. And this for similar height. But for water you depend on relief. The biggest one has a third of a km. Others a lot less. But you can go down many kms. so for a km, is already 6 times more. How deep is feasible? 5km? so 30 times more density. But the problem is that you need to dig the storage there. This is the biggest problem.
@@ehombane The storage potential is the same as water, however, this maintenance is far more costly and difficult. This is an incredibly stupid idea and any engineer that works on this should be permanently blacklisted in the community. I'm an engineer, and I regard this proposal as so stupid, I would never hire any engineer associated with it. It's a scam. This proposal is idiotic.
@@fuzzywzhe The same for weight, but better if we consider volume. And sure, liquid is better handled. And this will ad some levels of complexity, and maybe lower thew efficiency, but when you run out of hydro locations, less optimal solutions may be acceptable. Unless you do the math you cannot competently dismiss something. You remember? Russians laughed at Musk, when he asked to buy 2 rockets, it it said that even they spat at him. Are they laughing now ?
@@ehombane Musk has infinite money thrown at him, from the government, which you and I pay for. There's NOTHING at all useful with Space X - nothing at all. The ISS is a complete, total, waste of money. There's no research coming from it, it doesn't do anything other than act of a Public Relations platform. The Russians should have spat at him. Don't think the United States is a free market system, it's not. It's a centralized, fascist economic system, where completely undeserving, and sometimes entirely bankrupt corporations are kept functioning from direct injections of "stimulus" money. What do you think "covid relief" is for? Infinite amounts of money can be thrown at completely unworkable solutions that do nothing, however, there's a difference with energy storage. Investment of capital is proportional to energy expenditure. Thousands of energy units can be dumped into projects that product only 100's of energy units over their lifetime. In other words, you can spend more energy on something "green" than it will produce. This is the case with ethanol - it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you can possibly recover from burning the ethanol. You better get used to looking straight at corruption, and understanding it. Should this disastrous, stupid, idea be funded it's nothing more than a scam.
@@fuzzywzhe buddy, you did not understood my message. I will not bother analyzing your message, but I will explain mine. So. act 1. There was a shitload of money thrown at Russians. By who and for what, does not matter, I do not care. And there comes Musk to throw some more money at them. They said, oh, no, this is a stupid idea will not work. Act 2 Those money goes to Musk now. so his idea worked. I can give a lot more examples of things considered impossible, like planes for example. Al scientific community considered that heavier than air object cannot fly.But some morons wasted their time to prove the contrary. With this technology is the same. It seems unlikely to succeed, and it may fail if something slightly better gains momentum. But do not forget. This is a technology that worked for centuries, till a coil spring replaced it.
I would assume huge magnet is exponentially more costly than a weight attached to a generator. Plus, the specs of the generator in the moment will have more control than simply a magnet falling through a coil.
The thing to remember is that the Hoover Dam is holding back roughly 10 trillion gallons or 80 trillion pounds of water. At three hundred thousand pounds each, that would be 266 million loaded box cars. The Hoover Dam power is roughly 1.3 million houses worth of electricity.
True, but it is also a type of local ecological disaster, cost huge amount of money, and can't exactly be enlarged much. We already built the Hoover Dam as big as we could, we could not save any money by making it smaller, and we cannot build another as needed somewhere else. While the plan using existing mine shafts is also location dependent and maximum size limited, it takes far smaller amount of space and money and stays out of sight. With the other batteries you do not need as much space or starting capital and can increase the size and/or number of storage units as needed or as money becomes available. While other options might be little less efficient or cost slightly more per watt, they have other benefits and lack the issues of pumped hydro.
@@AnalystPrime my point was that unless you're going to have an equivalent amount of weight in your gravity batteries that they're not going to provide comparable levels of backup power. Concrete weighs less than three times as much as water per cubic foot. We are running out of Quality Sand for concrete and it produces CO2. Obtaining sufficient metal or Rock to make the weights from will have an impact. Anything you do on a scale suitable to the population is going to be an ecological disaster. The fundamental problem is that our population is roughly three times too high to be sustainable globally. If our population is between 2 and 3 billion people than many of these problems go away. Our economy is basically a giant Ponzi scheme based on an ever-increasing population. But clearly we cannot expand our population indefinitely so at some point the Game Stop's so why not stop it sooner? In any case, scale of these gravity storage ideas to be suitable for the population of any major city and they become huge and will require a substantial amount of Mining and maintenance. So they remain an interesting idea for small special-purpose cases.
@@macmcleod1188 Dams are an ecological disaster because they destroy the local habitat and force humans and animals to relocate. Studies also clearly show the fish populations have crashed since HD was built. Apparently the idea is to make those weights from recycled concrete or something like that to lower ecological cost, but building the Hoover Dam took humongous amounts of concrete and I'm sure nobody wants anyone building a dam try to skimp on quality and reliability. Anyways, they are not trying to replace HD but all the coal and gas burners, or at least offering a way to store the energy from those plants when they are idling.
@@AnalystPrime a massive expensive project with huge ecological impact still only Powers 1.3 million houses. Do you think that any of these gravity batteries are going to get close to that without being similarly massive projects? Flywheel storage would probably have less impact ecologically than gravity storage.
@@AnalystPrime my point was that just to match the Hoover Dam alone would require millions of boxcars worth of weight. If the weight was made of solid concrete it would need to be over one-third the size of the Hoover Dam Reservoir just to equal the capacity Hoover Dam Reservoir.
Propaganda and more propaganda... And that guy beco és the richest of the planet. And Tesla Inc vale is bigger than all others together. Ridiculous buble.
This might work on a demonstrator scale project. Practical contribution to power delivery is very questionableat best. The real world math usually spells the end of these pie in the sky projects.
Why not dig a wider hole with twin weights? One heavier, (say the left one) than the other, then slide an additional weight on the lighter (right one) that makes it heavier than the left one. The now heavier right one pulls the now lighter left one up. When the right one gets to the bottom, slide the extra weight off and the now heavier left one pulls the now lighter right one up. Then all you have to use energy for is to lift the EXTRA weight up as the right one goes up, to be slid back onto the right one, repeating the process.
@@gregd72002 - Cool! And it could be from my suggestion...I sent it to them (with the tower idea included) months ago after I first heard about their plans for building a working model.
Why? Because it is pointless waste of time and energy. Hauling up one or more weights(all in the same shaft) stores 1 unit of energy. Letting them fall turns the motor making it a generator and releases about 0.9 units of energy. Storage efficiency = 90%. Having two balanced weights stores zero units of energy and moving some weight around uses energy instead of storing it. The energy storage efficiency is less than zero percent. And the tower they use is a small scale one for testing purposes. Building towers also costs more money than using an existing hole.
Guys. you trying to make century old idea look new. And this is acceptable. But water reservoirs and pumped storage are so much better. How many energy you going to use per day just to keep your huge underground hole dry? Boring holes and maintaining underground passages are always was and will be costly. Sorry, but you reinventing bicycle with square wheels.
You need a good location where you can build a huge water reservoir and have a ready source of water to use pumped hydro, but there are few such places left anywhere near civilization. Digging up a valley and building a reservoir on a hill is already extremely expensive, doing it in the middle of wilderness because you couldn't find anything neared to your city or the people opposed destroying nature where they could see it multiplies the costs. You probably wanted that water available for drinking, agriculture, recreation or transport too; no, you cannot swim in the reservoir and there won't be many fish in it either.
Sir, the current state of the world is very bad. The world's climate is deteriorating. I think something needs to be done about it. So I have a new idea for power generation. Some engineers are needed to complete the work. And some investors need. Please help me.
Sir, the current state of the world is very bad. The world's climate is deteriorating. I think something needs to be done about it. So I have a new idea for power generation. Some engineers are needed to complete the work. And some investors need. Please help me.
