Re:Gravitricity – Fast, long-life energy storage
by syllable_studio on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @08:20AM
(#24420191)
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.
Re:Gravitricity – Fast, long-life energy storage
by reitzensteinm on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @09:54PM
(#24428127)
I read the whole pitch deck and it seems like you've thought it through well. I'm curious about the potential for failure; if one of the last links freezes up somehow (i.e. the disengagement you mention elsewhere fails), is there a process for clearing it?
The single shaft vs multiple parallel approach does seem a bit risky in the early days. If there's a 10% failure rate, and you built one shaft, that's a 10% chance of an existential threat to the company. 10 shorter shafts mean one will likely be inoperable.
Of course over the long term worrying about this doesn't make sense. Once you've scaled, 1k large vs 10k small shafts would not matter from this perspective.
Best of luck mate!
If you picture a dense weight like a cannon ball on the end of a string you're right, but if you're digging down n meters, encasing n/2 meters worth of dirt and moving it up and down the free n/2 meters of shaft, the energy storage would indeed be proportional to n^2.
I don't know anything about the field and had the same reaction you did, but considering parent is running a startup in it they're either a lunatic that doesn't know the equivalent of FizzBuzz or there's something we missed on first inspection, and we should charitably assume the latter...