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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> the load of an entire large city.

Maybe if you are lifting the entire city. For perspective, take electric vehicles. Each moving EV is a mass being constantly accelerated at say 0.1G. So the weight in the graviticity system to power those EVs would have to be at least 10% of the mass of all the EVs active in a city.

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This is only used to smooth out power generation with respect to demand. It doesn't have to power an entire city, just the shortfall between demand and current supply. Which, granted, could be substantial in a 100% solar and wind grid.

I just mean for load balancing a city running on wind and solar to optimize their costs.

> Maybe if you are lifting the entire city.

This would be a really cool element in a sci-fi world

A long time ago I did the napkin math to check if it'd be worth it to lift a skyscraper up and down just slightly for energy storage. You know, you'd just use adjusting ramps as the height changed ever so slowly. Not surprisingly, it's surely not worth it. The empire state building could run some tea kettles, but, yeah, no.

I calculate a rather better figure for the Empire State Building:

365000 tons × 9.81 m/s2 × 1 m = 1 MWh

which ought to at least be enough to provide short term backup power to the whole building.

Japanese TECOREP brand demolition system generates power as it lowers material down from skyscrapers

https://sipilpedia.com/tecorep-system-high-tech-demolition-s...

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