The use of space to store energy is maybe double of what typical damn reservoir uses to store the same amount of energy.
Here's some totally useless back-of-the-envelope calculations on land requirements for this sytem.
The United States, in total, used 1,819,393,805 MWh of energy in 2016. If one plant provides 35MWh of storage, that means 51,982,680 plants are required.
That comes to 84,211,942 acres of land. There are 2.3 billion acres of land in the United States, so it would require 3.66% of the US. That's obviously a huge overestimate.
The beauty of this is the simplicity. This is something we could have built 40 years ago. And unlike LIBs, there's much less worry about degradation and we can put these out in the desert near a solar power source without worry.
Imagine it combined with solar thermal, which has dropped immensely in price per KWh.
Also, concrete reabsorbs around 43% of the co2 used to create it over a period of time.
But they'd probably be mechanized before long.
> If anything, that's a plus.
That's the world you want to live in, where there are more construction crane maintenance workers than teachers, police officer, food service workers, lawyers and doctors combined and then tripled? Is there no possible better use for human potential that fixing machines that lift bricks?
"Truck Driver", however, is a common job title[0] which may go away thanks to automation. Finding a replacement role would be nice.
I'm not sure you mean to insult people whose job it is to fix machines that lift bricks, by the way?
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-...
Why is working on power storage and generation meaningless? Cheap energy is literally the basis of our civilization, tech, and standard of living. Would you consider power plant work or oil drilling work meaningless?
That's why I asked if that was the pinnacle of human achievement. If nothing was better. Because it crowds our other things at that level.
10% of that makes more sense, even if it goes, let's say, 50% solar
10% would be overkill. I don’t think we should be aiming to sacrifice our livelihoods to be concrete block stacking addicted energy horarders, but I’m not entirely against that either. It’s hard to look at a solution so tangible and transparent as concrete block stacking before ducking my head into this mangled half-commented test suite.
As others have said,they likely would be placed near the solar plant where land is cheap and dry, rather than in neighborhoods.
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/739881515751628436...
And methane is a greenhouse gas 20-80x more potent than carbon dioxide.
Concrete has the advantage of lasting "forever" in those conditions (rebar when wet ruins it, otherwise it last long, long time). Concrete also stacks perfectly as you can mold it however you want. Might bite the bullet and stick with concrete, just work on making it more efficient.
I'm sceptical of that. As the sibling comment noted, the technology is well-tested, yes but for a completely different usage pattern. You don't know how reliably construction cranes are in lifting heavy loads in back-to-back cycles, 24/7.
Additionally, I'd guess you will have to modify the cranes to realize the "recover energy" parts. I'm no expert, but I could imagine, traditional parts spend energy for both raising and lowering a weight because the design goal is reliable control of the load, not making energy. So you'd probably have to modify the motor assembly.
From what I've been told, the magic isn't in the generators (almost every project I'm working on is just using a standard industrial motor as a generator) but in the smart regenerative drives which both supply and harvest power from them. Harvesting power from industrial processes to keep costs down seems like it's a very common thing to do, so these drives are available off the shelf, and are designed to plug into a variety of existing motors.