syllable_studio

This is probably a joke, but it's not so crazy. Many designs are combining one or more of these.

Haha, thanks. It's a little of both of course. You have to be a bit of a lunatic to think you can do these things. But someone's got to get it done.

Hey andbberger, Yeah, we're _definitely_ assuming that g is constant for all elevations :)

There's another thread on this comment page talking about why height is important. Please see this slide in our presentation illustrating it. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17FI-jrI9RWS3q7Ng44Yh...

Thanks!

- Regarding jams, failures, etc. These should be extremely rare, but in the event, each unit is designed to "disengage" if needed so it's just dumb weight, and modules adjacent to it will be designed to lift it. Then when the train is above ground, the unit can be swapped out for another one and repaired while the system keeps operating. - Yup failsafe mechanisms will be built in as well. - Yeah each unit has its own motor/generator. A power line will enter through the module's axle.

Quite a few comments question the cost of digging -- which is understandable. But the context to remember is that these are huge infrastructure investments that will return revenue from that investment over 20-100 years with little maintenance costs. The excavated shaft is like a factory not a product. The product is each cycle of energy generation giving you a profit day after day. The shaft is a one time investment that will yield that product forever.

There's lots of research showing how the costs work out (see my other comments here)

Haha well, 70 of those slides are appendix slides.

The way our design works, the modular weights are autonomous on a track. So we don't have huge cranes above ground. We just have a track above ground that also runs a mile. That track can be partly or fully buried if desired. It will be enclosed protecting it from weather, and solar can be installed on top to save real-estate.

But yes, these installations are enormous. They might cost around $150M and could provide about 200MW.

Terrament is patenting a number of different designs which enable us to maximize both height and weight to nearly 100% of a mine shaft. When you think about the physics of suspending thousands of tons inside a mile deep hole, the devil is in the details. To paraphrase Boromir, One does not simply hang a mile of concrete and steel from a cable ;) There are already some videos on the website that give away some details. We're waiting to secure funding before sharing the rest.

edit: oh sorry, I think you meant gravitricity sorry. I'm not sure what they're patenting. Also I don't think their patents are in the US.

Yeah, compressed air is a very viable and promising solution. It does have efficiency trade-offs as you mention though. And typical compressed air designs still use fossil fuels in the compression process. There are some new designs I've seen that get around using fossil fuels.

One of the most prominent new startups out there exploring advanced compressed air is hydrostor. Note that they also dig underground :) https://www.hydrostor.ca/technology/

Gravity is weak, but it's cheap. It is indeed surprising, but plenty of research shows that the levelized cost of gravity storage is cheaper than Li-ion batteries - even if you assume that Li-ion will get 4x cheaper in the next 20 years. There are other problems with Li-ion as well that will prevent it from scaling up to the amount of storage that our grid will need. I discuss all this with lots of citations in a white paper here https://github.com/syllable-hq/uphs-feasibility-study

Damn, you're right - thanks spot5010. I thought that I could use "exponential" colloquially and it would still be accurate enough (because quadratic scaling is even more esoteric to most people). But thanks for the callout, you're right that saying exponential is technically just wrong. I'll figure out how to re-word.

Yeah, this would be similar to what energyvault.com is doing. I love that energy vault got funding ($110M) and is pushing the industry forward. But IMHO, I ultimately don't think they will be able to compete with underground gravity storage because of the massive 10x advantage you get from digging underground and getting 10x more height (see my other comments below why that is.)

The issue with using natural landscapes is that it limits your height. And adding more height is ~exponentially~ (edit: quadratically) better than just adding more installations with an equivalent total height. (You can dig about a mile deep). You can see more details in my comments below - search for the text "It is worth it to dig a hole!"

I can see why you'd suspect that. But it turns out that the oil and gas industry has 100 years of precedent demonstrating how to build such shafts into bedrock. Flooding and earthquakes are all real concerns, but we have well-proven solutions.

The nuclear debate is interesting, with valid talking points on both sides. But even if nuclear were safer and cheaper than wind+solar+storage (which it isn't), it would take decades to build. We might not have that much time.

Climate change is urgent and we need all hands on deck to build as fast and as cheap as possible. May the best designs win asap in this fight!

You can in fact! Pumped hydro is already the cheapest form of energy storage - about 95% of all energy storage is pumped hydro. We can't build more pumped hydro because it's not feasible to build enough dams. (We've used up the best locations)

The US Gov has studied plenty of research showing that underground pumped hydro is cost effective and obviates the need for dams. (See my white paper here: https://github.com/syllable-hq/uphs-feasibility-study)

So startups like Gravitricity (and Terrament, my startup) are innovating on what is already well-researched territory.

Yeah, and as I mention above, the key thing is height. You can build 10x taller underground than above ground. And that gives you 10x more potential energy for the same amount of weight.

It is worth it to dig a hole! Because building one tall tower is ~exponentially~ (edit: quadratically) better than building multiple shorter ones side by side with the same combined height. You can dig a mile deep which is about 10 times taller than the practical height of a tower. My startup, Terrament, is working on a similar technology, and there is a slide in our deck that illustrates this. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17FI-jrI9RWS3q7Ng44Yh...

Reusing abandoned mine shafts could have an advantage. But there is also ample researching showing that the cost of digging from scratch is still worth it. The US Dept of energy even studied it back in the 1980s when they were evaluating underground pumped hydro energy storage. I wrote a white paper on it that's linked from here. see here https://www.terramenthq.com/uphs/

Quite a few similar companies are looking at compacted earth mixed with concrete to reuse some dirt and rock that is excavated. See also https://energyvault.com/

I love Gravitricity. I'm the founder of a similar startup called Terrament. We are also building gravity storage underground, but our patents are extending this idea to use autonomous, modular weights. This enables us to maximize both height and weight, which is the simple recipe for cheap gravitational energy storage.

We are also working on a seed-round of investment. It's an exciting field with plenty of room for competition. And it's so important for fighting climate change! We need to build this asap. https://www.terramenthq.com/

I found that these two articles provide some good context about YAM and yield farming. It seems like there is some messy, but really interesting experimentation happening in DeFi right now.

https://www.coindesk.com/defi-degens-gaming-ethereum-money-l...

https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-expla...

Can Proteus be cut by Proteus?

Hacker News, you can't hide from this important topic about a lack of diversity. We need to discuss this and fix it as a community.

https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1277616493149196293

That is a toxic reason to flag something! You can't just run from an important topic because some people will troll it.

Are you serious? Was this article really just FLAGGED? Was it flagged just because the article mildly criticises Hacker News and it's moderators for not having enough diversity?

It would not surprise me if the mods shut down this thread. But I question whether they should. And I question whether they would shut it down if they had more diversity. Why should I not be able to upvote someone's comment just because they say "I'm a proud minority"? and I want to support their voice?

Thanks so much! It does look like it's had a little traction. I'm glad to see that. I'll check it out and pass this along to friends who have been asking.

People will never understand Tesla's value if they don't understand that Tesla is more than just a car company. (But no comment on the current stock value.)

But what is the title??

Thanks, here's a somewhat higher resolution image. https://media.nature.com/w3000/magazine-assets/d41586-020-00...

Fixing our PPE supply chain was/is a solvable problem that our governments have utterly failed to address properly. It is shameful that our federal and state governments haven't better organized and incentivized solutions to fix this. I understand that it's hard. I understand that they're working hard to address this problem. But it's unacceptable that we haven't just gotten this done -- that we've instead put the burden on our medical workers to solve this life-or-death problem. As if they didn't already have enough to worry about.

I feel much closer to this issue than I expected to be. Because I worked for weeks with a volunteer group called helpfulengineering.org to help figure out how to make face shields through local partnerships. I was helping organize efforts for the city of Chicago. Our group made dozens of 3D printed face shields, then hundreds. Each face shield was given to a medical worker who sent back stories about how desperately important each one was to them.

https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1247891099324051462

In an effort to scale up faster, we got price quotes from local manufacturers who could manufacture NIH vetted face shields in bulk using injection molding or die cutting. These local manufacturers were very eager to help and work with us. We were prepared to get our own investment to kick-start the manufacturing as long as we had some confidence that we could get the products to market and not lose tens of thousands of dollars. We were prepared to sell them AT COST - not even for a profit. Next step: we just needed help to connect these manufacturers with an organized supply chain.

We talked to government offices and offered to help them get this plan in motion. But no one could do anything except direct us to generic websites and phone numbers. We filled out forms and called numbers. Never heard back. One government office told us they were working as hard as they could, and there were numerous projects in the works... but they couldn't give us any more information. No transparency.

Weeks later, the hospitals are still in desperate need. There is still no plan to solve this problem. Corporations have stepped up to donate a million here and a million there. This is great. But it's not a replacement for the war-time effort we need to save thousands of lives.

Thank you to so many leaders who are working hard -- including those from Chicago. But we've got to do better than this. If our medical workers were soldiers, we would not send them to war expecting them to find their own community donated helmets.