• 9point6@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    We actually have a growing amount of gravity battery capacity in the UK, currently a drop in the ocean around 15GWh, but I believe 200% of that is currently in construction.

    IIRC the same article I read about this suggested we could make use of all the old coal mines, retrofit them to become gravity batteries relatively cheaply and gain magnitudes more capacity than we have today.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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      18 hours ago

      Oh yeah, I read about this. I get the impression that they’re out of the proof of concept stage, based on a few places where it’s worked well; it seems like capacity is on its way upwards now

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Oooh. Very interested in this. I was thinking about trying to build my own gravity battery, but my back of the napkin calculations for the mass and height are nutty. I don’t think a small scale home-size device would be viable…

        • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Yeah. My crazy idea now is to drill a well, seal it with concrete and use it as CAES, and then put a small Gravity battery inside of it… But even then, the gravity battery would add a negligible amount of energy storage… It’s just really hard to find good energy storage at this scale.