Pumped hydro is the only real gravity storage solution | Hacker News Reader

Pumped hydro is the only real gravity storage solution

cleantechnica.com

3 pointsasah6 comments

> I have no idea what ARES is actually claiming it’s doing because it’s not worth reading its website, but it’s literally this stupidly bad.

No. It's not. It's a shame you didn't bother to read the ARES website, because they've clearly explained that they're not using powered wheels on rails to bring the weights up the rail track. It's cable-driven, not a locomotive. You don't need "10km of rail and a 1km long train"

Your entire article is so full of arrogant insults and dismissals-without-reading that it's really hard to take seriously.

tl;dr: orders of magnitude difference in storage density by using a dirt cheap, high density, easily pumped medium (water) that finds its level automatically and uses existing geographical features to create big height differences.

Thoughts?

I've only read a little about this, but from what I understand, it's hard to find places that are actually good for this - and the volume of water you need to produce a significant amount of energy is quite large for given place where you can get enough height.

My intuition is it's probably better to just over-deploy wind and other renewables - pumps and turbines are not exactly free or easy to maintain either.

but this system is "easier" than say hydro because no artificial dams need to be created, all you need to hae is an existing water system at the top and at bottom. then pump up, pump down. rince and repeat.

Not an expert, but I have read somewhere probably the most effective use of this is to pump water back up behind dams - imagine you could pump water from the bottom of hoover dam using wind power or whatever. All the generation equipment is already there, so you sorta get that for free. Additionally with lake mead shrinking this might enable more hydro power from existing infrastructure even in the face of climate change.

What this means for water-rights downstream, I have no idea - probably not good.

yeah so how about using existing dam structures and building a second reservior at the bottom and using the same system? that would conserve a lot of water and downstream wouldn't have to be used because it would be a closed loop

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