Gravity Battery

if it was all converted into mechanical energy sure, but its tied up in electrons and potential differences in the electricity of the battery, and we all know, electricity cannot be converted into mechanical energy so easily

Google "water tower". It is the most common usage of this. Once the water is up there, you don't have to pump it to get it anywhere else. Typically, you use wind to fill them.

>and we all know, electricity cannot be converted into mechanical energy so easily

80% to 95% is pretty good though.

How would it take more energy to lift the water than you get when you drop it (discounting the slight pumping inefficiency obviously)
The reason it hasn't been done is because its a bit costly and has no demand right now

98% efficient motors have been achieved

>Google "water tower"
for the love of god don't do this! especially don't google the inside of a water tower, it is a dark, derelict rusty place never meant for the eyes of man, and god help all those workers who have to repair these kind of things, its like visiting a sunken shipwreck, in total darkness they have to wade around blindly, always at risk of dying to any mechanical failure or overly rusted piece of maintainence equipment.

And dont even get me started on the horrific accidents that could happen if it started filling up while they were inside of it, they could be drowned or forced into tiny pipes and crushed to death by the water. And no one would ever know until their bodily remains wound up in someone's tap water.

youtube.com/watch?v=fowhAYSfXZw

youtube.com/watch?v=4So1JV4AygM

Water Towers, abandoned refineries, smokestacks, sunken ships, basically any large space enclosed in metal, tends to be some of the most horrific and scary places on the Earth, especially because they are very dangerous too with the condition of the metal which has rusted over the years. You could fall down these holes and labyrinths of pipes and never be seen again

The power is used in dams, to pump water from the bottom to the upper basin

That's how countries do when there is an excess in electicity production, along with selling it to their neighbour

So your idea has been already realised, in a more efficient way. The efficiency of a dubble lake system with pump and generator has an efficiency of 70-80%. And it can store far more than the energy for a laptop battery.

It's like geothermal, except more complicated and more prone to failure.

So there is your answer

There was a company throwing around the idea of doing this in the ocean. You'd be able to store more power since it's deeper. Also you'd be able to train some seals to lift the weights back up.

Completely retarded.

PHES exists and works great, but good luck moving thousands of tons of material to replace a couple lead acid batteries for your home.

Yeah I remember this too, it has potential but anything involving fabric isn't going to last long.

It isn't the 1950s anymore, user. Plastic and enamel is used inside water tanks. There are even these little robot vacuum things based off pool cleaner models that keep the tanks free of sediment.

wew, lad

We already do it with water tanks at the grid level.
Way better than digging a giant fucking hole, lmao who comes up with this shit

pumped hydro has more to do with economics than energy

aresnorthamerica.com/

I can remember this pulp mill which had all sorts of mid-20th century industrial shit on their property. And one time they had this smokestack that had been all clogged up after decades of use without any cleaning, and when they went in to scrape all that shit out, they found the skeleton of some worker who had fallen in decades previous and everybody assumed he had just quit.

Don't old grandfather clocks use this?

>How does Veeky Forums feel about this gravity battery energy?

Interes6ting concept, but I still prefer thermal storage... less moving parts, less failure modes, less maintenance costs, etc.

nothing new
youtube.com/watch?v=XF7mbEsEP04

TRAINS

>> thermal
>> less moving parts
You take some perfectly good usable electrical energy and then turn it into heat and then put a lot of effort turning the heat back into electricity

And because you need a heat engine to turn heat back into electricity efficiency is low. Not to mention the difficulties of storing heat.

i was going to say, you would need a really deep hole and a fucking heavy weight...

fucking memes

>idea is complete shit
>w-well use less energy
no, make less shit power generation instead

someone took time to make such a nice pic when a simple calculation a literal mid schooler could do simply discart this shitty idea

How can people still take solar power seriously when the post shit like this?

> use 20 time less energy
k, mate
> gravitylight.org/
Meme Energy Incorporated (c)
Powering LED for couple of hours =/= entire home for an evening

these holes would have to be insanely deep for this to be effective. still whats the point of it? its not a generator and would need to be powered to "recharge"

>bawwww BAAAAAWWWWW!!!!
> i don't wanna use less energy!!!! >:[
>i must have my lotion warmer and 10amp dragon dildo powered at all times!!!!

This is what you sound like. Hambeast manchildren from the USA and Europe with coal & nuclear powered gaming PCs and AC units from the 1980s.

Use less energy manchildren. It isn't that difficult. Anyone can do it. Even you, kid.

You seem a bit triggered by high energy consumption. It's not possible to reduce energy consumption 20-fold for me. I usually don't waste it so much. I'm the last person you can use that strawman on. Nevertheless, the technology is objectively shit, and I was making point about gravity battery, not the economy part. Also, fuck you, anarcho-primitivie piece of hippie organic shit.

This is nothing new. They've done this on a grand scale already with dams. Go fuck yourself "think outside the box with a green approach" arrogant millennials boxing and packaging everythign with a cozy infogram to put their masks on.

/use of multiple tubes allows charging and discharging simultaneously
/not understanding faraday's emf
/not understanding torque is proportional to load
/not realizing only 1 tube is needed for both

>It's not possible to reduce energy consumption 20-fold for me.

The point is that you forego that horseshit and use conventional energy generation methods. Thus, stop being such a fucking energy hog, you twit.

LOL IKR I GOT THIS THEY SHOULD BE USING MASSIVE SPRINGS MY GRANDFATHERS LONG MASSIVE CLOCK RUN ON TWO ENORMOUS SPRING LOADED BEARINGS JUST WIND IT UP SO IT IS NICE AND SPRUNG AND IT WILL WORK FOR TEN FULL DAYS WHICH IS A SHIT LOAD BETTER THAN PALMING UP A COUPLE SOLID METAL WEIGHTS LIKE ON ACTUAL GRANDFATHER CLOCKS NO THEY WANT TO USE HOLES IN THE EARTH LIKE WE KNOW HOW TO MAKE AND THEY CALL IT GREEN BUT THERE'S BLACK OIL COMING UP TO MESS ALL THAT SHIT UP

It sounds like a good idea. But for one it is astronomically huge in size, as compared to the types of batteries we currently have. And it would almost certainly cost more to create.

Also currently lithium ion batteries potentially could retain 92% of their charge after a full year. I bet the amount of energy lost to friction and air pressure would make this entire concept nothing more than trivial.

all things said that gravity light is nifty. I mean people talk about it almost like it's some perpetual energy machine but it would be nice to have one if you like to go camping.

underrated post

maglev flywheels all day

>so half a laptop battery.
27.22 Wh is pretty paltry for a a laptop battery's better half.

Which I suppose only makes this shit even more sad.

Application of a 1000 kg weight hefted 33 feet off the ground -> light off a 2 watt LED.

Power a garden lamp by hefting your entire house up a rope and letting it fall to drive a generator. Fucking brilliant, this, gentleman is the future.

Now, what's high density and relatively common?

Why LEAD!

The wee problem being, we could also use the lead, and a bit of sulfur, and some HCl and water to make a lead acid battery pile.

Off hand I don't know what 1000 fucking kg of lead going into a deep cycle battery is, exactly, but I'm sure it's in an order of kWh of storage capacity, not Wh, and heck-- if you really wanted you could heft the battery 33 feet in the air too and get that amazing 27.222222222 Wh of additional power, perhaps a bonus of 1%

As nigga, you gotta have that 1%.

Now, lets go the other way, a 100 kg dead weight, it now travels 328 feet to deliver that amazing 27.22 Wh of RAW POWER!

32 fucking floors.

But WHY NOT, lets forget geology and dig a shaft 1000 meters deep, and let a weight of 10,000 kg go down that shit.

Mother fucker, we have arrived-- 27.22 kWh.

Now, I don't know how much digging a hole deeper than humanity has ever dug would cost, let alone arranging a 10k ton dead weight to go down it on a rope or whatever.

But... tractor batteries, deep cycle Pb S HCl, they cost about $80/kWh. 30 kWh -- to give a healthy draw down limit-- runs about $2400.

Oh, but that MUST be more expensive than digging a km shaft. Thank goodness for ingenuity!

Yes, that's right, I'm just jelly of these clever inventors.

>digging a hole deeper than humanity has ever dug
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

Note:
>the mud that flowed out of the hole was described as "boiling" with hydrogen

There's more than enough deep hydrogen to burn all the oxygen out of the atmosphere.

You see, the Earth (taken as a whole) contains a lot more metal than it contains oxygen, sulfur, or halogens to form stable compounds with. So even once you get into the deeper parts of the crust (let alone the metal core), there's a lot of underoxidized metal. The Earth also has a lot of water. The ocean is miles deep, and if you dig just about anywhere on a continent, you'll get to groundwater. That stuff pushes into every crack. There's another whole ocean's worth of water down there. It also gets warm pretty fast as you go down.

Underoxidized metal + water + heat = oxidized metal + hydrogen

Yeah this is what happens when art majors start pretending they are engineers.

>1000kg weight falling 10 meters reaches 14 meters per second before impact creating a kinetic energy of 98,000 Joules (27.222... Watt-hours.)

27.22Wh is 7.78Wh less than what my shitty netbook needs to run (35Wh.)
My netbook would need a 1285.7143kg weight falling 10 meters reaching 14m/s creating 126000 Joules (35Wh).

Moving 2834.51lbs of weight up 10 meters sounds like a shitshow to me. How about just pump up water (339.05gal) a little bit at a time into a container that holds the proper amount of weight. When it falls, it makes the energy, when it is at the bottom, the water goes from that container into another container already in the up position. One falls, the other gets lifted and then filled. Add extra weight to compensate for the rising empty container weight, which won't be very much really.

With that system, you don't need solar or any electric energy. You only need wind power to turn a small pump. Though, you really should attach that pump to a stationary bicycle and have the OP run it. That way he can slowly realize what it takes to do this shit.

WAIT!

What if...

HOLD ON!

What IF

IMAGINE!

...What if, the weights in the gravity thing were actually batteries themselves? They rise and fall and also get charged up normally.

YESSS

Is there a single good reason to use this instead of a big fuck-off flywheel?

Tssssch. Look at this kid using Earth gravity. Nah, we're gonna use Jupitor gravity on this shit. Science bruh.

Using it on a small scale is retarded because you have to make it tall to store a reasonable amount of energy, so it would be more reasonable to build a series of one kilometre tall towers that store 400 megawatthours of energy each (the weight is a 50m × 50m × 50m lead cube in this example).

aresnorthamerica.com/

already in use using off-the-shelf equipment

Why not use the energy to spin a dense flywheel magnetically suspended in a vacuum? Similar concept, but much less required space and a higher energy capacity.

Fun fact: a variant of this scheme is in the Supreme Commander game. Pictured is an energy storage unit, which is a couple of weights on a piston that moves up to store energy and down to drain it.