The power capacity of that setup was like that of an AA battery, if I remember correctly.
You need huge amounts of water and lots of height difference.
However, home scale conventional hydro is a thing. If you live on a hill with a creek that runs down it you can install a generator that produces a usable amount of consistent power for the cost of a few hundred meters of PVC pipe, a barrel, some connectors, and a small electric turbine. Search for micro-hydro if you want to know more.
Like all hydro solutions it's heavily dependent on the geography and only suitable for well under .1% of the population, but where it is feasible it can be a huge step towards off-grid living. Add in some batteries, maybe supplement with some solar panels, and you've got all of the electricity you need year round at a somewhat affordable price.
I've probably seen everything YT has to offer on that. :-D
While I really enjoy those videos and the "let's just do it" vibe with old washing machines as generators, I'm also somewhat happy that Germany has rather strict regulations on how to use water from streams and rivers. Some installations are quite disturbing for local ecosystems. But being off-grid in remote areas these solutions seem like a probable compromise.
They do say it is about equivalent to a single AA alkaline. It is not exactly an optimized efficient setup, but still, it gets the point across. Pumped hydro is a grid scale option, in places that have the ability to store a lot of water.
Pumped storage scales well though, as the stored volume scales squarely to the required container material (e.g. storing 25,000L will only take 10x the material while storing 100x the energy).
Wolfram Alpha [0] says this is about 5 Watt-hours, and gives some other handy comparisons:
> ≈ 0.45 × metabolic energy of one gram of fat ( ≈ 38000 J )
> ≈ 0.63 × energy released by burning 1 gram of ethanol ( ≈ 27000 J )
> ≈ metabolic energy of one gram of sugar or protein ( ≈ 17000 J )
> ≈ (0.02 to 0.09) × typical kinetic energy of a car at highway speeds ( 200000 to 900000 J )
> ≈ 0.5 × typical battery energy content of an alkaline long-life C battery ( ≈ 9.6 W h )
> ≈ 0.55 × typical battery energy content of a nonrechargeable Lithium-Thionyl Chloride AA battery ( ≈ 8.6 W h )
> ≈ 0.92 × typical battery energy content of a carbon-zinc D battery ( ≈ 5.2 W h )
Gravitational potential energy is just really, really low energy density. Fortunately it's reasonable to have pumped-storage reservoirs that contain trillions of litres of water.
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1750+kg+metres+in+watt-...
https://www.epa.gov/red-hill/what-red-hill-bulk-fuel-storage...
They were recently decommissioned due to leaks, but I've often wondered if they could be repurposed as gravity battery storage.
edit: if you want to check my math. I calculated the tanks at ~567 million liters, and am saying there is 120 meters of vertical distance.
They would be equivalent to a 0.1856 GW h (gigawatt hours) battery if repurposed in this way. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=567810000*120+kg+metres...
Oahu uses about 225MW on average in residential electricity [0], so this could store an hour or so of excess capacity. That's not nothing, but you might want to 5x or 10x it to really smooth out demand and supply peaks for the island.
Note that you also need a set of tanks or a lake at the bottom of the hill. The tanks are 75m tall, so how are you accounting for that in your 120m of vertical distance?
[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036 gives 2,018 kWh per person in Hawaii
>Oahu uses about 225MW on average in residential electricity [0], so this could store an hour or so of excess capacity. That's not nothing, but you might want to 5x or 10x it to really smooth out demand and supply peaks for the island.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/hi/hawaii/top-stories/2022/08/...
This solar plant & battery system was completed last month. The battery is able to store 144 MWh. This shows me that planners and people thinking about this are willing to invest & commit to power solutions at this scale. I don't know if you are aware or have read up on the red hill controversy. These tanks were used to store fuel by the Navy. They leaked earlier this year and poisoned the Red Hill aquifer and have caused quite a bit of local controversy.
I'm struggling with the idea of writing a letter to the editor outlining this concept, but also emphasizing how converting these tanks to a water storage/ energy storage facility would improve local resilience to drought, bring down water costs, improve environmental conditions etc.