The company Gravitricity It's going to start manipulating massive weights on an axle to store and deploy energy as needed. The axles will rise almost 1.6 kilometers in height and the weights will range between 500 and 5,000 tons. Huge winches will raise and lower the weights, and the axles will be pressurized to increase power production.
As the company says on your website: 'Our patented technology is based on a simple principle: raising and lowering a heavy weight to store and release energy.'
Gravitricity
According to those responsible for Gravitricity, maximum energy generation can reach between 1 and 20 megawatts, with continuous production of up to eight hours.
Costs are lower than current energy storage systems, such as lithium-ion battery-based solutions. Those responsible for Gravitricity also point out that, unlike battery systems, its storage mechanism can be charged and discharged several times a day without loss of performance for more than two decades.
The system's efficiency rate is 80 to 90 percent, and the system should last half a century.
The prototype system being developed by Gravitricity in Scotland, which will be completed and tested next year, will be limited to a 15 meter high shaft and a capacity of 250 kilowatts. Large-scale implementation will follow, as Gravitricity envisions utilizing abandoned coal mining pits globally for such energy storage plants.
Gravitricity's lead engineer, Miles Franklin, explains how the prototype will work:
Our demonstrator will use two 25 ton weights suspended by steel cables. In a test we will release the weights together to generate maximum power and verify our response speed. We estimate that we can go from zero to full power in less than a second, which can be extremely valuable in the frequency response and backup power markets.
The founder of Gravitricity is Peter Fraenkel, who invented the world's first tidal energy turbine. 30 years ago, the Fraenkel created a turbine to use the power of a river's current to bring water to Sudan, where he worked for a charitable organization. The civil war and lack of financing truncated their plans.
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The news
Construction begins on gravity-driven energy storage system
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.