I had the same thought. They do make it clear that this is a demonstration, but I'm curious how this scales with larger weights and heights; both in capital cost, and efficiency.
I'm also curious if anyone's seen a good comparison to hydro/dam based gravity batteries? Or even to the gimmicky sounding electric train based ones I've read about before?
My understanding is that anything near or past 90% efficiency gets very hard to achieve, but perhaps there are special cases where this isn't true?
Finally, I'm also curious how these compare to flywheels, which offer a similar style of energy storage, but with rotational potential instead of gravitational.
Storage is clearly one of the largest barriers to large scale adoption of many renewable sources of power we have. And, chemical batteries raise a lot of valid concerns in terms of safety and environmental impact.
I'm also curious if anyone's seen a good comparison to hydro/dam based gravity batteries? Or even to the gimmicky sounding electric train based ones I've read about before?
My understanding is that anything near or past 90% efficiency gets very hard to achieve, but perhaps there are special cases where this isn't true?
Finally, I'm also curious how these compare to flywheels, which offer a similar style of energy storage, but with rotational potential instead of gravitational.
Storage is clearly one of the largest barriers to large scale adoption of many renewable sources of power we have. And, chemical batteries raise a lot of valid concerns in terms of safety and environmental impact.