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Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

sciencemag.org

71–80 of 278 posts

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#71
post #6

And these systems are way larger, more dangerous (wind) and not as efficient as magnetic bearing flywheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

Yeah, if you do the math, it turns out that you need impractically large weights lifted to unreasonable height. Like, suppose you’re lifting 100 ton weight 100 meters high. That’s a rather large and heavyweight system. How much energy you can store this way? Less than $5 worth of electricity, as it turn out. This is basically the same as pumped water storage, but instead of immense amount of water you can pump betwee…

That's why you should use trains, which can safely go a few km high in good terrain.

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#72
The system bring talked about here can deliver 250kW during 11 seconds max.

That is LESS than 1 kWh of energy storage.

I hope it's not the one on the picture otherwise their cost estimates are way off and two orders of magnitude larger than current lithium batteries, even taking into account battery replacement.

Another problem would be the ever-lowering price of batteries comparing unfavorably against this good old tech with stable or raising costs (human costs tend to rise over time)

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#73
post #48

As usual everyone is fixated on price when the real hurdle will be scale. If we're going to replace our existing fossil fuel plants we need at least as much capacity. A quick grep in the article tells me these guys have a plan for a 4MW plant that involves a 1km shaft. That's the same order of magnitude as a single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land…

I did a bit of scratch math with the notion this might be more suited for individual, home power storage rather than grid supply - You need something in the order of a 5m tall tower bearing 73 tonnes to store 1 kilowatt hour (even then, ignoring conversion losses). So that's the weight of ~ten class-4 fully laden heavy trucks.

Once you can get it up in the air then the higher you can go you're doubling your storage in a linear fashion. Hoist one of those trucks to 50 meters (perhaps you have a handy cliff in your backyard) and you've stored as much as the ten trucks did at 5 meters.

So yeah scale seems hard, but the low technology/materials requirements and potential for gradual scale-up make this worthy of deep investigation. I think there's a lot of wandering off into dead-ends as far as limitations go though - Solutions that depend on a lot of concrete pouring, for example, are a no-go if the end goal is reducing atmospheric carbon.

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#74
post #48

As usual everyone is fixated on price when the real hurdle will be scale. If we're going to replace our existing fossil fuel plants we need at least as much capacity. A quick grep in the article tells me these guys have a plan for a 4MW plant that involves a 1km shaft. That's the same order of magnitude as a single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land…

Batteries do not replace power generation capacity directly.

They can, however, be configured to cover huge surge loads for short moments, or smooth out small discrepancies over a longer span, in more or less the same footprint.

If you want a GW of coal, you need a GW plant, whereas with batteries you can decide between a gigawatt-hour or a 1000 megawatt-hour using a similiar footprint (scale to capacity of chosen technology).

This reduces the need for significant unclean backup capacity, and either decommissioning them or reducing their usage.

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#75
post #13

Stopped reading at a total cost of more than $300 per MWh for batteries. Quick back-of-the-napkin calculation: Car batteries come in at less than $100/KWh. They're good for at least 1000 cycles at 80% capacity. That gives us at least 0.8MWh for a 100$ investment. It's very, very unlikely that initial construction of the site and operational costs more than triple that price.

Their marketing has the LCOS of those 2 solutions the other way around - $171 for Gravity, $367 for Litium Ion batteries. See https://gravitricity.com/technology/

Too bad they don't seem to provide the actual report anywhere (and neither does ICL), they just quote a single chart from that without any details. This feels fishy to me - I'd want to look into the cost basis they used, as a key problem with comparisons against batteries is that the battery cost has changed so much over the recent years (halving every 5 years or so), and many studies quote their battery price calculations on older reports that are now off by a large multiple.

$367 of LI batteries at year X is $171 of LI batteries at year X+5 and $86 at year X+10, so it's important to look at what the X is in their study. And of course, we should consider that chemical battery costs are expected to decrease in the near future, while the cost well-established mechanical components would stay stable.

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#76
Here's an idea: what if -- instead of digging a deep hole into the ground -- we use the tower of a wind turbine as the vertical space in which the weight is raised/lowered?

A wind turbine is already equipped with a generator, so it'd be a matter of building some sort of "switch" which would make it either: (a) generate electricity using the turbine, as per usual; (b) raise the weight using the turbine, thus not producing electricity; (c) generate electricity by connecting the weight to the rotor/generator, while lowering the weight.

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#77
post #48

As usual everyone is fixated on price when the real hurdle will be scale. If we're going to replace our existing fossil fuel plants we need at least as much capacity. A quick grep in the article tells me these guys have a plan for a 4MW plant that involves a 1km shaft. That's the same order of magnitude as a single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land…

Your assumption that we need that much storage is simply wrong. This pops up in just about any article on HN mentioning batteries. Somebody will jump to the wrong conclusion that we need to provide massive amounts of battery storage and that therefore we need coal/nuclear/etc. (i.e. really expensive ways to generate energy) because buying so many batteries is obviously stupendously expensive. It's a popular argument with nuclear proponents and with the fossil fuel industry.

The reasoning roughly goes like this: wind and solar capacity varies because wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. This is very obviously true of course. Except these effects are local, temporary and typically result in a reduced capacity rather than a complete collapse. You always get some output out of solar panels (except at night). And wind turbines might stop spinning but it's extremely rare for that to be a continent wide thing. Offshore wind is pretty reliable. Also these effects are kind of predictable via weather forecasts so we can plan for them. Same with seasonal patterns. Simple cables rather than batteries are the key technology that we need. And we mostly have that in place already.

The grid connects power plants via cables. So, we can compensate for local dips in power with remote peaks. What matters is the collective performance of the grid. That still fluctuates but not nearly so dramatically that you'd need a lot of battery. E.g. the European grid is very connected. So, you might get power from Norwegian hydro, North Sea offshore wind, German on shore wind, solar plants in Spain, France, Germany, etc. or any of the gazillions of solar panels on people's houses. And of course there are coal, gas and nuclear still on the grid as well (for now).

All of that failing 100% at the same time is simply not a thing. Not even close. It's not something grid operators plan for. It might dip by 20-30% but it might also peak by that much. And it's likely to average out over time in a very predictable way. All that means is that we need to have a little more capacity. 2x would be overkill. 1.2 to 1.3x plus some battery will probably do the trick.

Batteries on the grid are intended for and used exclusively for absorbing short term peaks and dips in both supply and demand. Short term as in hours/minutes; not days or weeks. They are very good at that.

This is why modest amounts of lithium ion batteries are being used successfully in various countries. These batteries can provide large amounts of power (MW/GW) for typically not more than a few hours. The reason that is cost effective (despite the cost of these batteries) is that taking e.g. gas peaker plants online for a few hours/minutes and then offline again is expensive and slow. And of course with cheaper wind and solar providing cheap power most of the time, gas plants are increasingly pushed in that role because they are more expensive per kwh to operate. Gas plants on stand by still cost money. And turning them on costs more money. Batteries basically enable grids to have fewer (and eventually none) of those plants. These gravity based batteries have the same role. It's a cheaper alternative to lithium ion batteries.

Currently, clean energy is the dominant form of energy in many countries already (e.g. Europe, China, parts of the US). In some countries it's well over 50%. This proves the point because these grids don't feature a lot of battery currently and the combined capacity of peaker plants (i.e. not operating continously) is far smaller than the presumed need for batteries. If you were right, these countries would be facing massive blackouts all the time as their dominant form of energy disappears for days/weeks on end. That's obviously not a thing.

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#78
Since scale and locality is such an issue here, I wonder if there are any concepts for integrating such a system in new mid-rise buildings. Similar to an elevator shaft, but with a weight of depleted uranium instead of the passenger car.

You're digging for the foundation anyway, maybe maybe the marginal cost to dig a few meters deeper is worth it. You're building with a crane anyway, maybe the marginal cost to build a steel frame tower on the roof is worth it. It's certainly not a mine shaft, but perhaps better than nothing.

Re: Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts

#79
post #48

As usual everyone is fixated on price when the real hurdle will be scale. If we're going to replace our existing fossil fuel plants we need at least as much capacity. A quick grep in the article tells me these guys have a plan for a 4MW plant that involves a 1km shaft. That's the same order of magnitude as a single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land…

"Also, we already have gravity-based systems, only nature does all the work of raising the payload for us in gaseous form, and we let it fall in liquid forms. But it takes so much dam place"

We actually also do have self created gravity-based systems, where we also do the work by ourself, to have a energy storage on demand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

They work reliable and with big capacity since the very beginning of electricity. The only problem is ... scale. You cannot just build them where you want them. You need rivers and height differences.

Unless you create such systems completely artificial and there are plans to do so, but that will be very expensive.

edit: here is a paper (in german) discussing such possibilities, to create a artificial pumped-storage out of the remains of surface mining

https://epub.wupperinst.org/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/72...

edit 2:

and my opinion is, that I am not a fan of complicated solutions, like the originial solution from the article seems to be, which is also stated as "The technology is still “incredibly immature”

There are solutions to make batteries without rare elements. They just don't reach the energy density of lithium based ones, but that is not really a problem, when you have them stationary.

So if you could scale up production of these and in the end, have a big battery in every home/factory connected to the grid - you would have a stable grid without any need for gas- or coal powered backup.

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