Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries

Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries by kumarvvr on Monday January 11, 2021 @06:37AM (#25727612)

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.

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Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries by desman on Monday January 11, 2021 @06:58AM (#25727773)

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)

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Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries by kumarvvr on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:35AM (#25728070)

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

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Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries by baybal2 on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:49AM (#25728187)

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

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Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries by riffraff on Monday January 11, 2021 @08:07AM (#25728371)

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

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Re:Energy Vault – Gravitational Batteries by baybal2 on Monday January 11, 2021 @08:22AM (#25728518)

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.

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