Gravity Energy Storage : A very uplifting technology!

i've got my dangerous hammer out again folks which means yet another slightly lame attempt at demonstrating a physical concept in order to introduce a video don't knock it though it's cheap and it's quick and it was the heaviest thing i could find in my draw of many things so i'll have to do you might remember i last used it when i looked at liquid air batteries a few months ago back then i pointed out how in very basic terms if you can find a way to use energy to make something physically happen in a reversible way then you've probably created an energy storage device and then i lifted the hammer and dropped it and explained that if i tied a piece of string to the end of the handle and attached that to a dynamo then i could have briefly generated electricity so i thought to myself why don't i actually do that for this video to really show you that it works and then i saw these young shavers from the reconstrained design group in madeira led by an extremely talented british designer called james auger they had the distinct advantage of a fourth floor balcony and made up the ante a bit by using a 15 litre water cooler bottle and a smartass gearing system which i hadn't thought of anyway the result is that they were able to very slowly lower the water bottle to generate enough energy to run a turntable playing false and prison blues by johnny cash i can't let you hear the music not because i don't enjoy a bit of the old man in black but because despite being dead johnny still insists that people pay him whenever they use his stuff so i'll leave a link to this video in the description section and you can listen to his unmistakable dulcet tones there instead the point is the system works and if you're clever you can control it extremely precisely either to deliver energy very quickly like my design or in a very controlled and gradual way like their contraption and that means if you could scale it up you might find yourself with yet another solution to grid scale energy storage simple right hello and welcome to just everthink using gravity to provide electrical energy is of course nothing new we've been doing it with pumped hydro since 1907 when this facility was first started up in shaffhausen in switzerland but not many pumped hydro facilities are being built anymore mainly because they take years to construct cost about a billion dollars and quite rightly need all sorts of long-winded and difficult environmental permits but there are a couple of companies now working on the same concept as james auger and his mates literally lowering extremely heavy weights off the top of tall buildings but in a much much larger scale this 150 meter tall tower system has been developed by a company called energy vault led by co-founder and chief executive robert picone and it's really very clever indeed essentially you've got three big cranes bolted to the top of a 35-storey steel structure surrounded by a stack of huge blocks arranged very precisely into a tight cylinder they look like concrete don't they and if they had actually been cast from brand new concrete that would have been a very bad idea indeed from an environmental point of view but energy vault have partnered with mexican materials companies cemex to develop a composite material made up of waste products there is some concrete in the mix but it all comes from demolition debris that's added to coal ash industrial slag and even some of the soil from local building sites all of which would most likely otherwise have just been dumped in landfill there's six thousand of these composite bricks in the structure and each one weighs 35 tonnes a system of pulleys and motors all controlled by mind-bogglingly sophisticated software can move several blocks at a time shifting them from their predetermined positions in the tall tight stack to another very precisely control position lower down creating an outer cylinder as the blocks are lowered the pulleys cause a rotation that generates electricity then when the structure needs to be recharged renewable energy from surrounding wind turbines powers the winches to pull the blocks back up into their original location the company developed their system in switzerland and built their first full-scale commercial demonstration unit or cdu on the outskirts of a town called arbado castilloni in 2020 they claim a standard configuration can provide 35 megawatt hours of power to the grid it's pretty quick too picone reckons the system can go from zero to four megawatts in just 2.9 seconds and provide instant response within milliseconds and that means it rivals lithium-ion batteries as a frequency response grid balancer but it can also be used as a black start service which in other words means bringing a grid system back online in the event of a blackout or it can be run more slowly to provide up to 10 hours of continuous base load discharge energy vaulted backed by some pretty hefty investment too in the form of 110 million dollars from softbank a japanese investment bank specializing in bringing sustainable technologies like this to market softbank already invest in large-scale renewable energy projects all over the world so their partnership with energy volts should be a kind of symbiotic relationship with the bank opening new doors for energy vault an energy vault system facilitating even more competitive cost structures for soft banks investments piconi says they've got their levelized cost per megawatt hour down to somewhere between 30 and 40 dollars which if combined with renewable energy sources can potentially undercut existing gas-fired power plants hot on their heels but not quite so far ahead on development is this edinburgh-based startup called gravitricity founded by a guy called peter frankel frankel is perhaps best known for inventing the world's first full-scale tidal energy turbine which was bought by the german energy and manufacturing giant siemens gravitricity are working on the same basic principles of physics as energy vault but their unique selling point is that they intend to utilize disused mine shafts as underground void spaces into which they can lower their electricity generating weights you might think that's a bit of a serious limitation but actually there's a surprising number of these shafts strewn all over the planet a full-size version of their system will be able to move weights of between 500 and 5000 tons up and down within the shaft using multiple cables to distribute the loads evenly they claim a 50-year design life with no cycle limit or degradation something that represents a significant advantage over lithium-ion batteries just like energy vaults they reckon they can hit a zero to full power response time of less than one second with a system efficiency of somewhere between eighty and ninety percent and each of their units will be configurable to provide between one and twenty megawatts of peak power delivered either in fifteen minute frequency response bursts or as long duration discharge up to eight hours they're currently building a demonstration prototype in scotland as part of a 1.5 million pound project funded by a 640 000 grant from a british government agency called innovate uk and around eight hundred thousand pounds that the company have generated themselves via crowdfunding the scaled down demonstrator will use two 25 ton weights suspended from the opening of the shaft by steel cables the company will first drop weights at full tilt to record the maximum instant generation speed for grid frequency response and then they'll conduct a second test lowering the weights more gradually one by one to establish the parameters for longer duration supply if the tests go to plan then that should lead on to their first full scale model sometime in 2021 with a capacity of four megawatts and if they do manage to successfully exploit all the available mine shafts then eventually they plan to sink their own drop shafts in new locations opening up even wider markets lithium-ion batteries currently dominate the grid scale energy storage market it's a sector that bloomberg new energy finance projects to grow from nine gigawatts in 2018 to more than one terawatt in 2040 but there's a growing number of alternatives including these gravity systems that are now challenging lithium-ion supremacy we've already looked at liquid air batteries and redox flow batteries another option is zinc air which is being developed by a canadian firm called zincate and then there's liquid metal batteries being developed by ambry both of which we'll take a closer look at in future programs in the meantime if you have views or direct experience of these technologies then why not jump down to the comment section below and leave your thoughts there that's it for this week though thanks to our fantastic patreon supporters who help keep the channel independent and keep these videos ad free you can support the channel and receive 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Channel: Just Have a Think

Views: 118,490

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Id: lh1--ftWWvY

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021