...and using water instead of concrete. And then you get pumped storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... which is reasonably widely used and doesn't attract as much investors' attention as this "innovation"

To be fair, Pumped Storage is really dependent on Geography. It has downstream affects on environment due to having reservoirs where none have been and all.

It's powerful, cheap and long lasting, but not easily available.

One can't eat the cake and have it too.

Well, this thing also depends on geography. There aren't many places where such a construct would be easy to build: seismic situation, static stability for these enormous weights, winds (it's actually quite funny to see cranes side by side with wind turbines in their commercial)

True, but the choice of available places for cranes is much much higher than pumped storage.

Just build water towers. 100m water tower is nowhere near as an extreme engineering as this.

a 100m water tower doesn't hold as much energy either does it? It's pretty light compared to concrete, I think.

Less by 2.5 times, but it being 2.5 times more wouldn't make much difference. Power, and energy density would still be very, very bad.

Would a better design not to bore downwards instead of build upwards? This seems like such an over-engineered concept that could be simplified and compartmentalised drastically.

There's a whole host of negatives I see in this implementation, not to mention the downsides of erecting a crane-line structure and public opinion.

This is a UK company doing what I described above: https://gravitricity.com/ (i have no affiliation)

Drilling is also complex and expensive. You'd have to go down, reinforce it and deal with pumping at the very least. On the other hand a crane is, well, a pretty small and simple (/well known) thing. It's a crane and a stack of bricks, it doesn't feel particularly over engineered to me.

Either may make sense given the surroundings but I don't think building up is an obvious problem

From a personnel safety standpoint (what a catastrophic failure looks like in each case), a unit installation cost standpoint (fabricate x amounts of bricks with x tolerance in the grooves plus a crane with y units of generation on top) and finally from a complexity standpoint of stacking stacking bricks (I assume is not just going to be a stored procedure and include some kind of error correction and monitoring).

I just cant see anything positive about this solution in the slightest. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that structure. A crane truly is a simple and well known thing but I have tangible knowledge of a large community pushback in the UK where all that was installed was a relatively small turbine on the top of a hill.

Boring and reinforcement (concrete spraying) is a tried and true technology and most importantly its out of sight.

I wonder if these could coexist with solar farms in deserts and the concrete blocks are simply filled with sand and made there as a part of levelling the field required to install solar panels. A rough analogy would be the cut and fill process that is adopted while making roads. Similarly when a new plant is sited the sand is removed and used to create a storage system. The main idea is that it would reduce transportation costs and will share the transmission lines that exist for the giant solar farms which will be installed.

One of my long term thoughts on this was to think and mentally design a system suitable for one 250 Watt solar panel.

Assuming an average of 6 hours of sunlight, a 250 W solar panel can collect about 1.2 kWh of energy, or about 5 x 10^6 Joules.

In terms of potential energy that is

5000 kg x 9.8 x 100 meters.

Pretty huge for one solar panel.

I have been thinking about storing energy in underground storage tanks, with compressed air, but roundtrip efficiency does not work out.

Alternative method is to heat any material and use that heat later. Like, molten salt. But these systems are not suitable for domestic use.

Now I am exploring chemical methods to convert carbon to fuels using solar panels.

An "obvious" improvement is to push blocks up, and insert new blocks below (yes, u need gearing, and maybe lean them on a slope). But you get quadratic energy per tonne.

Its amazing how much energy a 250W panel outputs. Imagine storing energy from a 1MW wind mill (free pole? ;).

It’s the same total energy per bock. Their design starts out with 2 rings of stone. To simplify assume both piles are equivalent. The first layer of stones is raised by the width of a single stone. The next layer is raised twice the height of a single stone. The n+1 set is raised 2n+1 layers.

Starting with more piles means a lower initial height. But, the only things that matters when stacking is initial and final heights, and transmission losses.

Demand supply matching, reducing solar curtailment by innovative use cases will lead to thousands of business ideas. Although most still make sense at large scale and difficult to bypass the grid or apply anything in terms of storage at small scale like an individual house.

Couldn't you instead of making solid concrete blocks fill them with junk, using just a little concrete to make the shape right?

They are, already. They use a type of rock "glue" to fuse together rubble — in some cases old broken up concrete. The GP comment is a pretty basic HN middle-brow response.