ratten@lemmings.world 5 hours ago
How come we can’t design energy storage that lifts something heavy when there’s excess power, and lets it fall to generate electricity when needed?
1 Watt is the equivalent of moving 1Kg 1 metre in 1 second.
If you want a kilowatt - you need to move 1,000Kg 1 metre in 1 second. Or, I guess, 1Kg a Km.
Plug the numbers together and you’ll see that you need a massive physical load and a huge distance in order to store a useful amount of energy.
It’s an idea that’s been played with a few times, but there are many energy loss points in such a system, as well as logistics for keeping the “stack” from falling over. The best so far is pumping water up to an artificial lake, but that’s still not very efficient.
The energy math doesn’t make sense for grid scale applications with solid objects.
However if you can get water between two places it can work quite well. You need to live close to a big change in altitude and do a bit of geoengineering to create the upper and lower reservoirs, which can be destructive to local ecology, but not as much as a dam.
…wikipedia.org/…/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
You can also use pumped air underwater with higher energy losses than pumped storage hydro because of compatibility of air.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 11 minutes ago
Adamsomething covered this a while ago.
tldw; lifting solid mass isn’t very efficient and have “too many moving parts” issues. Moving water with pumps to higher planes, and letting it down with turbine generators works though.