“You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t quit the game.” - C.P. Snow [1] (No idea if that’s the correct attribution, I heard it from a professor 20 years ago)
My personal shorthand for this is to focus on the efficiencies of energy transformation and transport. Converting or moving energy means we lose some fraction of the total energy. All we can do is minimize that fraction.
The main point being that with that mental framework, I can easily assume that your posited approach won’t be more efficient than a solar panel or some other process with fewer transformation steps because each step magnifies energy loss inefficiencies.
Basically, the entirety of the energy debate is two things: How can we harvest energy cheaply and move it with minimal waste.
This is the basis for the whole room temp superconductor story that captured a bunch of our nerd imaginations, what happens if you get super close to zero energy loss while moving electrons?
Also, one more thing to keep in mind is constraints. Your proposed solution may be way more efficient by some metric if we change the constraints. For instance, my brain mostly goes to transportation which is transport and storage with immediate demand requirements. However, if our requirements were different along the lines of “lets store as much energy as possible over months, to slowly release it over months”, inefficiencies of scale change things. Then maybe slowly moving water uphill during summer while releasing slowly during winter is a valid thing to consider [2].
[1] https://gohighbrow.com/laws-of-thermodynamics/
[2] https://medium.com/drax/how-to-turn-a-mountain-into-a-giant-...