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

There's so much bullshit in mainstream energy analysis; there's too much incentive. Energy is central to civilization - what we use, where and how we get it, how we use it, how much of it there is and when we can use it - change any of those variables, change the shape of the entire civilization.

Yet the conversation around energy technologies is entirely dominated by dollar cost. This obfuscates so much, and lends a false equivalence to pricing/market/financial mechanisms - it implies that if something can be sold cheaply (low price) then it can be produced/extracted cheaply (low cost).

We are quite capable of, and actively involved in, stealing from our futures (high cost) in order to achieve low prices in the present. The economic externalities of our energy usage don't go away - by definition, that which is finite and we use now to do this, cannot be used later to do that.

That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit. Junk nobody needs that we'll convince them they want anyway.

And why are we doing this mad, insane, thing? Because we're convinced it doesn't matter, we're convinced the price of energy will always be low. We're convinced we're not the ones paying the costs.

Apologies for going full doomer on y'all. https://pics.onsizzle.com/oh-i-made-myself-sad-me-irl-242092...

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/gpot.html

The storage might scale this way but not the output when demand is high.

Does it? If you use iron instead then we only need to know that it has eight times the density of water. Multiplying a volume by eight is not a lot; it's only twice the size in length, width, and depth.

So let's imagine replacing a typical hydroelectric power station [0] with a 'gravicity' system. Supposing the same depth you need a system of about one third of its length and its width and then fill it to the brim with iron. And of course do not forget to install cranes that are able to lift this iron to another space about 200m lower and back up.

By the way, for concrete blocks it would only be a volume factor of 2.5, which would mean about 36% more in length, width and height.

All in all, the amount of space that can possibly be gained with these systems seems pretty minimal to me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...

Edit: care to explain the downvotes?

First, there's not really any room in there, wind towers are built for the job, we don't add twice the amount of steel and an elevator shaft for funsies.

Second, even if there were some room it would be inconsequential, you need a lot of crap very high up to get significant amount of energy.

As demo, let us take the largest turbine available right now and lift the entire thing up and down its tower.

The Haliade-X has a hub height of 150m, a 600t nacelle, and 165t blades. In normal operations it's rated for 14MWe.

765t at 150m is 250kWh. You can get electric buses with larger battery packs than that. For reference, US households use about 29kWh/day.

That's the issue with gravity: it's really not that strong, so to store significant amounts of energy you need either ridiculous amounts of weight (hence dams and pumped hydro which can manage unfathomable weights), or extreme height difference (hence… still dams, pumped hydro a bit less so I think).

As a point of comparison, Bath County (the largest pumped-storage station in the world) has a hydraulic head of 270~385m and the upper reservoir stores 44 million tons of water.

Now taking in account that you can't really empty the entire thing, that it's not perfectly efficient, etc… Bath has a storage capacity of "only" 24GWh, it's not actually moving 44 million tons up and down 400m.