A totally new concept in electricity Storage

ozz93666

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"The energy storage industry is all about incremental improvements, so its rare to see a product come to market that does something radically different.
That happened last week when the stealthy Swiss/Southern Californian startup Energy Vault went public with an unusually creative grid storage concept. It devised a six-armed crane that stacks concrete blocks with cheap and abundant grid power, and drops them down to retrieve electricity when needed.
The company pitches this as a durable, trustworthy solution for the thorny problem of storing electricity for long periods of time.
The lithium-ion batteries that account for almost all of new grid storage deployments make economic sense for 4-hour duration, even 6-hour, but they get too expensive for super-long durations. Meanwhile, longer-term storage is getting more valuable as cheap but intermittent wind and solar power continue their rise on the grid......"

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Is this possibleto do on a small scale ? what sort of mass would be needed to get some reasonable storage ??

mgh ........... 1 tonne raised 10 meters ........... stores ,1000 x 10 x 9.8 = 100 KJ

One 18650 stores 10 W Hrs = 36 KJ

Might just be a sensibleidea if your land already had a mine shaft , or deep well .
 
100 KJ is 27.777777777778 WattHours or 0.027 KWh, this means 36 tonnes raised 10 meters for 1 KWh ????

How much power do You think it takes to lift 36 tonnes? I am pretty sure that You will burn a lot more than 0.1 litres of diesel fuel to do the work.

LiIon cells have a much better "payback" ratio.

100 LiIon cells weigh in at a mere 5 Kgs and can store the same amount of energy.

Sorry Mate, I think they fooled You. :)
 
I think the idea is to use solar powered motors to lift the weights during the day then at night drop them via geared alternators. Same as pumped hydro. Pretty cool idea actually.
 
What if you had a hopper, huge hopper, that held ball bearings. Then BB's would drop and land on a paddle wheel causing it to spin. Having either many small wheels or one large wheel is dependent on fast the startup needs to be, space available, expandability, and size of the BB's.
The paddle wheel(s) would then turn at a high speed which would then turn a larger generator
The BB's would be fed into the hopper by way of a Archimedes screw thereby minimizing the required energy/torq to lift them. Speed of reload would be dependent on available excess power and whether an electric motor or wind turbine driven (geared/belted, not powered) was used.

I've had this type of idea for awhile since I've seen several Incredible Machines that use the BB's to run the machine.
 
When power is really cheap the unit will convert into a space elevator after stacking up 36,000km of blocks...
 
Pumped hydro storage currently makes up the largest share of energy storage systems in the world. But finding a good spot to build a regular hydro dam is getting difficult enough. And for pumped hydro, you need 2 big dams in close proximity yet with as much altitude separation as possible - that's damn hard to find. And of course you enough consistent water inflow to at least keep up with evaporation and seepage, which is a very tall order for many places in the world.

These alternate systems with concrete blocks / heavy trains / gravel / etc are interesting because they can be constructed just about anywhere with a steep hill and some empty space. And adding capacity is as simple as adding more blocks.
I think in the future, these mechanical solutions will provide cheap bulk storage, and battery systems will provide expensive but instant response grid stabilization systems.
 
For using hydro, I've been thinking of using one of these:


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I collect pallets for various projects, and figure to build a platform from them, place the tote on top, then plumb it in. The totes have at least 1.5" outlet. Some even have 2 or 2.25" outlet. Not sure if that'd be high enough to produce enough pressure to run anything worth while, though.

Altho, pallets are free for me, and the totes cost about $50 a piece around here. So I can always build more water towers ;)
 
From The Engineering Toolbox:
"A body of 1000 kg is elevated 10 m. The change in potential energy can be calculated as
Ep = (1000 kg) (9.81 m/s2) (10 m)
= 98100 J
= 98 kJ
= 0.027 kWh"

And that's before taking into account any pumping and turbine losses.
I doubt containers on towers will ever make sense vs a simple battery system. One really needs 2 dams and a mountain for this to be competitive.
 
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