Pumped storage can be done at a scale 10,000x this. Even if it's 6x more "mass efficient", you're dealing with a minuscule mass compared to a dammed reservoir of water.
What the video showed us was a small scale example. The question I would be asking is "what is its energy density". Although pumped hydroelectric systems have been done, and have become proven technologies, their energy density is worse than that of lithium-ion batteries. On a scale of megajoules per liter, gasoline produces about 34 megajoules per liter, a lithium-ion batteries can produce 2 megajoules per liter, but a liter of pumped hydroelectric water only stores 0.001 megajoules per liter.
I’m think whether they could use existing freight trains and carriages to add more mass? Multiple heavy trains up each track every day using exiting carriages, shipping containers full of rocks or similar. It’s way more scalable and inexpensive.
You need enormous masses to store enough energy. For instance: One single 3-MW-wind-turbine can produce 72 MWh of energy on a windy day.This corresponds to the potential energy of nearly 26,000 metric tons elevated 1000 meters.Sure, the concept works. But it would probably be a very expensive kind of energy storage.Much more expensive than pumped storage power plants.
+Thomas Schuster Very expensive is still far cheaper than batteries. The technology is poor, lifetime is short, and the costs are enormous. These gravity batteries will essentially last indefinitely, if maintained correctly.
Yeah, all these grid storage systems are all cool, but when you run the numbers the shear scale you need to achieve is confidence crushing. Still, it can and must be done.
@the81kid @Just Curious Pumped water energy storage is a multi purpose solution as it can help mitigate flood problems, regulate water supplies, and obviously create power. I believe we are perhaps transporting water the wrong way though. Instead of transporting H2O we should be transporting the lighter molecule by itself towards a hydrogen fuel cell stack harvesting oxygen on site.
My idea is to use giant coil springs that are wound using motors or hydraulics during daytime. At night they would be allowed to uncoil, turning the turbines. The rate of uncoil could be controlled using electromagnetic brakes so you produce just as much energy as you need. The rest remains in the springs as potential energy.
I'm stealing this idea for a company name... I actually have an idea for gravity storage that is not pumped hydro, nor track that might *actually* have a niche. I should just patent my idea already... see if it hasn't been done, probably has, but it's better than trains... My idea actually started off as trains like this project. It's seems like it's an order of magnitude better. More massive, far more scalable and likely far cheaper. I'd actually say it seems more comparable to pumped hydro... less overall energy storage than pumped hydro, but I suspect rather than being 70% efficient, it would be more like 90% efficient. Yea shit I gotta do something with this but I have no clue where to start... Lol.
***** I know... that is exactly what happens in this example... when the cars need to be sent back up the energy generated is lost... the point of video is lost on you. It isn't energy generation it is storage. Like a battery.
This is better as there is no chance of energy loss due to evaporations or leakage. and far more energy is regained in having the carts move down the hill than having water fall. A hydro dam like what you suggest would lose about 20% of power put in, I'm not sure about this one but I am almost positive its less. as well as far more efficient compact, and less chance of problems.
When every other car is an EV a smart charger will act as a load leveller using 100.000 of battery packs to handle spikes on the grid. This was actually incorporated in the charger in the second revision of the first Tesla roadster, the T-Zero. Also ban electricity price speculation and have an adaptable , but national price, so different power companies have it easier to share loads.
Why can't this be done vertically? Doesn't it make more sense to do this from tall buildings or in the ground much like a well? It should also be close to population centers so less energy is lost in transmission.
There are two problems with storage, one is actually having an excess of renewable energy on a regular basis. Certainly the U.K. is nowhere near being in that situation and I doubt that very many other countries are. The second is that the capacity required is enormous so an equall enormous amount of spare power is required to charge and recharge the battery. We do have pumped storage in the U.K., but that is powered by fossil fuel generation and is not used to make up for intermitency of renewables but to deal with sudden spikes in demand
So you live on a mountain and own a Tesla, So instead of plugging it in when you get home, you have thrown out the back seats and replaced them with a pallet tank you fill up each night from your backyard stream. Each day when you arrive at work, you open a valve and drain the tank in the parking garage. No more paying to charge your EV. In numbers: A Tesla is 2.4 T+1T of water going down a 2000m mountain gets 18.5kWh charge. Going up again with an empty tank takes 13kWh. Hell yeah! you even got surplusr power for your fridge and TV.
I'm not convinced that we need the concrete blocks. And the proprietary loading system. And the proprietary cars with built-in motor/generators. Why not simply use existing rail cars? And perhaps existing (albeit modified) locomotives?
without the cars having motor/generators how do they return them to the top - other than hook many of them up to a single engine (which might be viable in some situations as well). Basically they're turning each car into a regenerative unit, so they have a lot of incremental capability in small units of power addition.
Energy is force times distance, so if the concrete blocks were gone, it wouldn't be able to store as much energy. You want to lift as much material as possible.
Just asking for your opinion on a different concept of my own that is quite basic. The build can at least be of 2 ultra strong permanent magnets, one above another where the top magnet stays stationary on a plastic* container maybe filled with water while the other is inside that container. Between the top magnet and the container needs to be a very narrow gap for which a light sheet of lead* can easily slide between the magnets just enough to cause the bottom magnet to fall as if it were a delicate power switch that the rise and fall will help* generate more electrical power than it would take to move the lead* sheet in and out of that gap in least frictionless way, maybe levitated by other magnets. The water is basic to prevent damaging and even far too much noise. . In summary... it would be as if the permanent magnets can be switch on and off like electro-magnets. . I tend to come up with a whole lot of various ideas that worked out awesomely, but... not often able to test my ideas out.
They'd be better cutting the batteries out and feeding the electricity from the car through the rails, or winching a mass up the incline and using the winch motor as a generator on the return trip.
Using a train with motors and gears and additional friction losses from wheels on rails means this system isn't intended to be super efficient or take up less space on the mountain. It is intended to be big and inexpensive.
"Efficiency"? Efficiency in regards to what factors? Are you talking in terms of economics? The physics of it? Or something else? For my part, I like the idea, but it instantly seems like a small cottage locality sort of thing, in other words: not scalable. It's extremely regional: certain geography must be present. The other large problem was that it uses land. The gravity is free, which is what these guys find exciting, but land is expensive. From a security standpoint such a system would be easy to "break" and costly to fix, defeating the original intention of dependable secure energy.
ClearOutSamskaras - Your opinion that trains are "easy to break and costly to fix", compared to what? Telsa battery modules? A pumped hydro dam? In the realm of "dependable secure energy", If one train has a problem there are several to choose from, some of the system will always work. Steep land can be very, very cheap as it makes poor farmland.
So the future is looking pretty good then. We could set one of these up pretty quickly just about anywhere there is a long grade hill or alongside a long grade rail installation and use it to power remote areas.
"HHO"? You mean that fake "super efficient fuel" bullshit that's allegedly modified water but doesn't actually fucking exist? The one that exists as a scam for cars? Because that's the only "HHO" I've ever heard of. If you mean that, you can fuck right off. Otherwise, please elaborate.
If it was 10% efficient that would mean that wind turbines that are over producing power that cannot be sold - now have a place to store some instead of shutting down.
If it was 50% efficient I'd say burn the idea and never fucking speak of it ever again. That's crap efficiency compared to pumped hydro (80% efficient!). Luckily it's unlikely for it to have such fuck-awful efficiency.
You could ease the effort by doubling this on the opposite side of the hill Nd cabling them back and forth. The weight of one's decent would power the opposing accent. At least in theory. Just thoughts.
@@dougmc666I agree opposing masses will not work. But from his idea, the cabling part might be something though. Tell me your thoughts on this, A super large motor/generator uphill with capacity to pull super large drum-shaped Masses which have concrete or just raw muddy earth in them. Rolling these uphill will probably reduce the cost by a wide margin and store large amounts of energy. I heard someone say that a single train car is 130,000 dollars. Wow!
This is a good idea for making electricity going down hill but they never addressed in the video how they get them uphill and how much energy that takes which should be more than it produces.
No-one said it's an energy producer. This is an energy STORAGE device, like a big rechargable battery. It "charges" by using electrical energy to go up hill, it uses it's electrical motors to do this. It "discharges" by doing down hill, where it runs those motors backwards to generate power while slowing it's descent, it's like an electric car's regenerative braking.
This seems to have way more friction (energy loss) than an elevator. There is a company in Toronto who is storing compressed air in balloons under Lake Ontario. I think that is a better idea than this it is 10x cheaper than batteries. Pumped hydro is also likely far more efficient than this too. Also in New Jersey they are storing electricity in multi ton fly wheels that go at 4x speed of sound. That is a pretty interesting idea
each time you convert energy you will lose at lest 20-30% so electrical to kinetic then kinetic to electrical transformation will lose about 40-60% at best conditions
Who the fck cares you stupid nerd, this is better than no storage at all, while you are thinking about the perfect way we still are killing the planet, whatever stupid solution a peasant in texas can give is better than runing on fuels. Sick of Engineers denying ways of energy storage because eficiency
Buble these "stupid nerds" are solving the world's energy problems. I happen to be an engineer as well and much MUCH more efficient gravity storage methods already exist. This is an interesting idea, but I am not sure how effective it would be on the large scale. Being concerned about efficiency is why a power plant can produce energy at nearly 98% efficiency and produce low cost energy. By the way, calling someone a "stupid nerd" is an oxymoron that kind of lends itself to people who have ZERO idea what they are talking about e.g. yourself.
@@lukewebel5600 Has that happened anywhere? 98% efficiency in power plant? give me a peek of that. I know of supercritical C02 being superior but that's not even 80% carnot efficiency for steam turbines. I'm eager to know
this would be perfect for colombia. they have plenty of sun to catch solar and many of the major cities are surrounded by mountains. it would be reletivly trivial put a bunhc of these on the periphery of the city
*Great stuff! Nice work. The public really needs to see more of this. Have you heard anything about a new system called Optimal Future Energy Deployment ( **lovy.biz/qy48** )? I’ve heard some interesting things about it and my brother got some amazing results. I’ve also been searching for solutions to the problem of wind turbines killing birds and bats. Ultrasonic acoustics looks like a possible answer to saving bats, but I haven’t read anything lately about the best way to keep birds away from wind turbines. Have you heard anything?*
Storage is not an answer to intermittency, not that that is the only deficiencies that wind and solar have. Technically they are not suited to large scale grid supply.
The energy density of water in pumped storage systems is sweet F.A. But that's not an impossible problem as you can simply build *massive* reservoirs. The concrete with it's double mass & greater fall compared to water is still sweet F.A, yet realistically how big can you actually make the train? One sixth of the size of a pumped storage plant? The return of Brunell's wide gauge and depleted uranium as the mass, then you might be onto something! lol
@@fitrianhidayat They could divert the power into a massive electrically driven hydraulic press. This could compress carbon into diamonds. Then those could be sold to buy Li-Ion battery banks from Tesla. If the market for man-made diamonds is too soft, then they could simply be burned in the coal fired power stations to release the energy. lol
+Aaron Lehman A capacitor could be used after the kinetic energy is generated but this isn't electrical storage but rather storing of potential energy.
Has anything ever become of this? I guess they could even do this a cheaper way, by having cities like NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston etc... donate their old subway cars to the project. Still functioning (but obsolete) subway cars can achieve this same result. During the night, you drive each subway car up to the top of the hill, then during the day, you let each subway car slowly glide back down the hill, thus reducing the strain on the grid during the daytime!
+John Arizona , 50 MW Rail Energy Storage Project Receives BLM Approval April 19th, 2016 by Jake Richardson Cleantechnica Website The Bureau of Land Management has given approval for a right-of-way lease to Advanced Rail Energy Storage for a commercial-scale rail energy storage project on 106 acres of public lands in southern Nevada. “ARES Nevada will be a world-class facility and a point of pride for Nevada. The power production is clean and renewable - operation of the project requires no water or fossil fuel, and creates no hazardous waste or emissions,” explained Jim Kelly, the ARES CEO. rail tracksThe 50 MW project is intended to help stabilize the grid in terms of voltage and frequency. (The number of megawatt hours does not appear to have been reported about, but a page on the ARES site says a 100 MW project could have 200 MWh.) If the project proceeds, during the 8-month construction phase a minimum of 100 local jobs could be created, with 16 full-time positions required to operate the storage facility once it is fully operational. Six sets of trains would be used on 5.5 miles of rails for the project. The rail energy project is expected to have a use life of 40 years or more, once it is completed. If you are familiar with pumped hydro storage, you understand the basic concept of rail energy storage too, which uses electric locomotives and train cars on rails, instead of moving water up and down to turn turbines. When there is excess electricity created by solar and wind power or when electricity rates are at their cheapest, the rail energy technology can be used to drive locomotives up hill with cars behind them. Once they are in an elevated position, the cars can be released back down the slope so their generators produce electricity during periods when solar or wind power are less productive or unproductive. ARES says the capital cost for its rail energy storage technology is about 60% of that for pumped hydro. One advantage of using rail energy storage is that it uses existing technology. Obviously rails, locomotives, train cars and electricity generators have existed for a long time and are proven, so they do not need to be invented or iterated over and over again to be used for energy storage in the manner of pumped hydro. The manufacturers of the rails, locomotives and train cars play a role in the development of rail energy storage and can benefit by being able to sell their products to the developers.
Seems like a simple and easy to implement idea without a lot of technical breakthrough needed. Maybe sell the idea to someone who can actually get it done after 5 years. If he weren't so busy, I'd suggest Elon Musk.
And how much enery is needed to bring the car/s uphill again? Add friction as overall energy loss and I don't think is that efficient. Maybe a little. On top consider ALL the energy needed to build the infrastructure including man hours work, materials and all the fuel consumption that goes into it. Then of course something will break on the way and all that extra energy will be lost.
Hm! I've just thought of this myself. Only that I know how to overcome the topography problem. You need no hills, mountains... No storage batteries on walls. :) It's way simpler. But I have no one to talk to about it. Well, not unless I'm willing to simply give my idea away. Which I'm not.
How will you do that by making a tunnel or what. I am currently working this topic on my Personal Project Gravity storage currently I was focusing more on hydro storage but after seeing this video I got very intrigue with this new idea . so if you are willing to share your idea with me I am all ears :)
this machine travels downward about 80 miles. but if it's travels upward from the center point just 5 or 6 miles. it produces more energy while going downward than it's upward journey.
Our internet and WiFi run on fossil fuels or anything that generates 24/7 dose it generate 24/7 You never know how long the Wind is going to be blowing and how long the wind is not going to be blowing We need something non-reliant on Weather.
Why waste money on concrete when you can just add a carriage full of heavy rocks or similar? Concrete uses a lot of energy and it’s wasteful and expensive.
I'm wondering where are obtaining all the money for these kind of projects. If it comes from our taxes I disagree in investing in these. They can build an small scale project so they can save money technically this will not give you 60% energy from what he states I'm not an engineer but if you do a simple math it will not give you 60% why because you have to take that car up the hill and how much energy do you need to take it back up that hill? It doesn't make sense at all.
Um, this is very similar to everyone driving their Tesla to the top of a mountain and letting it roll back down. It’s not cheap, it’s not efficient,it’s high cost input and high cost to maintain……it’s a bit silly really.. But if you must carry on with it, can I suggest you put the CEO of Nikola in charge.
it's not BS at all - it's proven technology and very low-tech. it's just that the economics (which needs to include the net efficiency of the electricity recover AND the capital cost of the trains/track etc.) and the limited sites where this would work, just plain suck
I would pick pumping water to higher altitude anyday compared to a thousands of crappy concrete weights moving up and down with so much potential to failure. On top of that this will cost way more per 1MWh of energy storage. What a waste of research funding........
People in Africa don’t have drinking water because there is not enough drinking water in lakes and rivers for all 7000000000 people basically we ran out of non renewable drinking water
There are a lot of lakes and rivers and springs in Africa, how many of the 7000000000 people don't have any? How is your water non renewable, are you using rain water or some ancient stored ground water?
@@dougmc666 Lithium is not rare. The problem, if anything, are lithium mining operations that are too small to meet the massively increased demand in batteries. Though I heard somewhere even that is no longer the issue, as now it's battery production facilities.
?? You may want to explain it how u powering the train to go up hill ?? Ill stick to my free power idea generators and motors 12v motor turning 15v generator powering its self in a loop with a 12 to 120 converters
All these attempts... :) All inneficient! The best electrical storage is into people's cars at night... or their power walls.. Just make it cheaper during night. And you'll see some will program their washing machines too at night... etc.. The key IS NOT to store energy.. but use it , directly !
This is silly. Flywheel storage is more compact. Or just pull this weights stright up. The lateral movements is just useless and waste of energy. You are wasting a lot of land and energy (friction) on rolling on rails, not to mention that you need to extract somehow the energy (breaks? linear magnetic generators?), and temporarily store it in batteries or deliver using some kind of overhead cables or third rail. That is silly.
@@dougmc666 "Diesel" locomotives don't exist AFAIK. A combustion engine is simply incapable of delivering the torque to start a whole train. "Diesel" locomotives are really diesel-electric hybrid locomotives, using a diesel engine to power its electric motors and produce the needed raw force to get the train moving.
So does that mean you shut down your Thorium reactor every night and there is no need for storage? I don't think so, in the past reactors have run all night.
this is best way to produce energy going downward. but the return distance should be much more shorter while going upward. the upward track should be separate and much more shorter. this difference create extra energy.
Pumped storage can be done at a scale 10,000x this. Even if it's 6x more "mass efficient", you're dealing with a minuscule mass compared to a dammed reservoir of water.
What the video showed us was a small scale example. The question I would be asking is "what is its energy density". Although pumped hydroelectric systems have been done, and have become proven technologies, their energy density is worse than that of lithium-ion batteries.
On a scale of megajoules per liter, gasoline produces about 34 megajoules per liter, a lithium-ion batteries can produce 2 megajoules per liter, but a liter of pumped hydroelectric water only stores 0.001 megajoules per liter.
@@faragar1791 wouldn't that depends on how high you pump that water up?
I’m think whether they could use existing freight trains and carriages to add more mass? Multiple heavy trains up each track every day using exiting carriages, shipping containers full of rocks or similar. It’s way more scalable and inexpensive.
The water will evaporate in a sunny day, it would reduce the water stored. It would also take more power and more time to pump water.
@@greenleafyman1028 The evaporation loss is tiny if you cycle the reservoir daily.
Any up to date news on this project?
scam, as always with "revolutionary" project that only rely on physical principle.
@@yutuniopati Not scam. It doesn't have enough funds for massive scale that's why it never been used.
You need enormous masses to store enough energy. For instance: One single 3-MW-wind-turbine can produce 72 MWh of energy on a windy day.This corresponds to the potential energy of nearly 26,000 metric tons elevated 1000 meters.Sure, the concept works. But it would probably be a very expensive kind of energy storage.Much more expensive than pumped storage power plants.
+Thomas Schuster
Very expensive is still far cheaper than batteries. The technology is poor, lifetime is short, and the costs are enormous. These gravity batteries will essentially last indefinitely, if maintained correctly.
Yeah, all these grid storage systems are all cool, but when you run the numbers the shear scale you need to achieve is confidence crushing. Still, it can and must be done.
Does anybody know what a good, sustainable solution for more advanced renewable energy in developing countries?
@the81kid @Just Curious
Pumped water energy storage is a multi purpose solution as it can help mitigate flood problems, regulate water supplies, and obviously create power. I believe we are perhaps transporting water the wrong way though. Instead of transporting H2O we should be transporting the lighter molecule by itself towards a hydrogen fuel cell stack harvesting oxygen on site.
Just Curious hi
My idea is to use giant coil springs that are wound using motors or hydraulics during daytime. At night they would be allowed to uncoil, turning the turbines. The rate of uncoil could be controlled using electromagnetic brakes so you produce just as much energy as you need. The rest remains in the springs as potential energy.
1:25 I'd sure like to hear more about how a train can go three times higher than a water pipe!
Sisyphus is finally feeling atoned for his formally useless boulder exercise lol.
That would've been a great company name or logo
I'm stealing this idea for a company name...
I actually have an idea for gravity storage that is not pumped hydro, nor track that might *actually* have a niche.
I should just patent my idea already... see if it hasn't been done, probably has, but it's better than trains... My idea actually started off as trains like this project.
It's seems like it's an order of magnitude better. More massive, far more scalable and likely far cheaper. I'd actually say it seems more comparable to pumped hydro... less overall energy storage than pumped hydro, but I suspect rather than being 70% efficient, it would be more like 90% efficient.
Yea shit I gotta do something with this but I have no clue where to start... Lol.
Just put a water tank up there and fill it up
***** I know... that is exactly what happens in this example... when the cars need to be sent back up the energy generated is lost... the point of video is lost on you. It isn't energy generation it is storage. Like a battery.
This is better as there is no chance of energy loss due to evaporations or leakage. and far more energy is regained in having the carts move down the hill than having water fall. A hydro dam like what you suggest would lose about 20% of power put in, I'm not sure about this one but I am almost positive its less. as well as far more efficient compact, and less chance of problems.
When every other car is an EV a smart charger will act as a load leveller using 100.000 of battery packs to handle spikes on the grid. This was actually incorporated in the charger in the second revision of the first Tesla roadster, the T-Zero.
Also ban electricity price speculation and have an adaptable , but national price, so different power companies have it easier to share loads.
A lot of infrastructure for quite little potential energy. It would work but the cost to production ration will prevent it.
World needs more people like these heros. Not people who like war who like to destroy humanity.
Why can't this be done vertically? Doesn't it make more sense to do this from tall buildings or in the ground much like a well? It should also be close to population centers so less energy is lost in transmission.
Buildings are a lot more expensive than using hills. Using existing buildings can't hold much weight.
@@BertVanMullem they use it in some buildings via the elevators
Gravitricity
There are two problems with storage, one is actually having an excess of renewable energy on a regular basis. Certainly the U.K. is nowhere near being in that situation and I doubt that very many other countries are. The second is that the capacity required is enormous so an equall enormous amount of spare power is required to charge and recharge the battery.
We do have pumped storage in the U.K., but that is powered by fossil fuel generation and is not used to make up for intermitency of renewables but to deal with sudden spikes in demand
So you live on a mountain and own a Tesla, So instead of plugging it in when you get home, you have thrown out the back seats and replaced them with a pallet tank you fill up each night from your backyard stream. Each day when you arrive at work, you open a valve and drain the tank in the parking garage. No more paying to charge your EV.
In numbers: A Tesla is 2.4 T+1T of water going down a 2000m mountain gets 18.5kWh charge. Going up again with an empty tank takes 13kWh. Hell yeah! you even got surplusr power for your fridge and TV.
Might be dangerous going downhill with an overloaded car.
Sounds like a waste of 1,000L of water if you just drain it in the parking lot. It's smart, but a waste
@@Brandon-uy1uv the drained water would just evaporate and end up back in the mountains as rain.
I'm not convinced that we need the concrete blocks. And the proprietary loading system. And the proprietary cars with built-in motor/generators.
Why not simply use existing rail cars? And perhaps existing (albeit modified) locomotives?
But how will they sell you all the proprietary shit in that case :P
without the cars having motor/generators how do they return them to the top - other than hook many of them up to a single engine (which might be viable in some situations as well). Basically they're turning each car into a regenerative unit, so they have a lot of incremental capability in small units of power addition.
AND
concrete manufacturing is a huge emitter of CO2.
Energy is force times distance, so if the concrete blocks were gone, it wouldn't be able to store as much energy. You want to lift as much material as possible.
kindpotato - Yes, you want to lift as much inexpensive material as possible Ie: A place to store unused freight cars, no need to load anything.
Trevor Milton is cheering from the sidelines.
Thunderf00t I invoke you.
That worthless fucking hack?
No.
Just asking for your opinion on a different concept of my own that is quite basic. The build can at least be of 2 ultra strong permanent magnets, one above another where the top magnet stays stationary on a plastic* container maybe filled with water while the other is inside that container. Between the top magnet and the container needs to be a very narrow gap for which a light sheet of lead* can easily slide between the magnets just enough to cause the bottom magnet to fall as if it were a delicate power switch that the rise and fall will help* generate more electrical power than it would take to move the lead* sheet in and out of that gap in least frictionless way, maybe levitated by other magnets. The water is basic to prevent damaging and even far too much noise.
.
In summary... it would be as if the permanent magnets can be switch on and off like electro-magnets.
.
I tend to come up with a whole lot of various ideas that worked out awesomely, but... not often able to test my ideas out.
What about using the excess storage to pull like a resistance band, that spins a rotor. A bit like the pull back toy cars.
They'd be better cutting the batteries out and feeding the electricity from the car through the rails, or winching a mass up the incline and using the winch motor as a generator on the return trip.
Kinetic energy storage sounds like a good idea but the flywheel system seems like it would be more efficient and compact
+moosefactory133 This isn't kinetic. It's using gravity.
This is potential energy and a flywheel will stop by friction.
Using a train with motors and gears and additional friction losses from wheels on rails means this system isn't intended to be super efficient or take up less space on the mountain. It is intended to be big and inexpensive.
@@dougmc666 yea, but you could always just dig a deep hole and use a lead weight, or depleted uranium or whatever.
Flywheel system is good for storing energy for short term because it loose parts of it energy overtime
As long as we don't talk about efficiency, this is a great idea. But this isn't serious if we really want to store energy.
"Efficiency"? Efficiency in regards to what factors? Are you talking in terms of economics? The physics of it? Or something else?
For my part, I like the idea, but it instantly seems like a small cottage locality sort of thing, in other words: not scalable. It's extremely regional: certain geography must be present. The other large problem was that it uses land. The gravity is free, which is what these guys find exciting, but land is expensive. From a security standpoint such a system would be easy to "break" and costly to fix, defeating the original intention of dependable secure energy.
ClearOutSamskaras - Your opinion that trains are "easy to break and costly to fix", compared to what? Telsa battery modules? A pumped hydro dam?
In the realm of "dependable secure energy", If one train has a problem there are several to choose from, some of the system will always work.
Steep land can be very, very cheap as it makes poor farmland.
Is it not better then battery because of the chemical stuf involved?
So the future is looking pretty good then. We could set one of these up pretty quickly just about anywhere there is a long grade hill or alongside a long grade rail installation and use it to power remote areas.
interesting idea, using potential energy, but hho storage is much more practical and space effective way to store solar and wind energy
Yes. More ideas the better. We can always improve upon these ideas😆.
"HHO"? You mean that fake "super efficient fuel" bullshit that's allegedly modified water but doesn't actually fucking exist? The one that exists as a scam for cars? Because that's the only "HHO" I've ever heard of.
If you mean that, you can fuck right off. Otherwise, please elaborate.
I like the idea, but i worry a little bit about how much energy is lost. I hope this system is at least 50% efficient
If it was 10% efficient that would mean that wind turbines that are over producing power that cannot be sold - now have a place to store some instead of shutting down.
I believe they reported 80%.
If it was 50% efficient I'd say burn the idea and never fucking speak of it ever again. That's crap efficiency compared to pumped hydro (80% efficient!). Luckily it's unlikely for it to have such fuck-awful efficiency.
This could work if we bring back a neutron star material that weighs a couple of billion tons the size of a smart car.
You could ease the effort by doubling this on the opposite side of the hill Nd cabling them back and forth. The weight of one's decent would power the opposing accent. At least in theory. Just thoughts.
The system uses mechanical work to move against gravity, balance takes away the work.
@@dougmc666I agree opposing masses will not work. But from his idea, the cabling part might be something though. Tell me your thoughts on this, A super large motor/generator uphill with capacity to pull super large drum-shaped Masses which have concrete or just raw muddy earth in them. Rolling these uphill will probably reduce the cost by a wide margin and store large amounts of energy. I heard someone say that a single train car is 130,000 dollars. Wow!
This is a good idea for making electricity going down hill but they never addressed in the video how they get them uphill and how much energy that takes which should be more than it produces.
No-one said it's an energy producer. This is an energy STORAGE device, like a big rechargable battery.
It "charges" by using electrical energy to go up hill, it uses it's electrical motors to do this.
It "discharges" by doing down hill, where it runs those motors backwards to generate power while slowing it's descent, it's like an electric car's regenerative braking.
It is for storing of energy,not producing.It is a big battery
great content thanks
This seems to have way more friction (energy loss) than an elevator.
There is a company in Toronto who is storing compressed air in balloons under Lake Ontario. I think that is a better idea than this it is 10x cheaper than batteries. Pumped hydro is also likely far more efficient than this too.
Also in New Jersey they are storing electricity in multi ton fly wheels that go at 4x speed of sound. That is a pretty interesting idea
Wow I am impressed!
each time you convert energy you will lose at lest 20-30%
so
electrical to kinetic then kinetic to electrical transformation will lose about 40-60% at best conditions
Who the fck cares you stupid nerd, this is better than no storage at all, while you are thinking about the perfect way we still are killing the planet, whatever stupid solution a peasant in texas can give is better than runing on fuels.
Sick of Engineers denying ways of energy storage because eficiency
Buble these "stupid nerds" are solving the world's energy problems. I happen to be an engineer as well and much MUCH more efficient gravity storage methods already exist. This is an interesting idea, but I am not sure how effective it would be on the large scale. Being concerned about efficiency is why a power plant can produce energy at nearly 98% efficiency and produce low cost energy. By the way, calling someone a "stupid nerd" is an oxymoron that kind of lends itself to people who have ZERO idea what they are talking about e.g. yourself.
@@lukewebel5600 Has that happened anywhere? 98% efficiency in power plant? give me a peek of that. I know of supercritical C02 being superior but that's not even 80% carnot efficiency for steam turbines. I'm eager to know
It's much more efficient when on rail as it has much lower friction than a rubber tier on a road
I thought commercial electric motor has >90% efficiency
this would be perfect for colombia. they have plenty of sun to catch solar and many of the major cities are surrounded by mountains. it would be reletivly trivial put a bunhc of these on the periphery of the city
Build spiral staircase type tracks.
And a hydraulic setup to bring it back up
Runaway freight train on rail three.
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How they will return to origin??
On the Avasva you can count on professional help with problems and technical support.
Storage is not an answer to intermittency, not that that is the only deficiencies that wind and solar have. Technically they are not suited to large scale grid supply.
Have they seen Wego now?
The energy density of water in pumped storage systems is sweet F.A. But that's not an impossible problem as you can simply build *massive* reservoirs. The concrete with it's double mass & greater fall compared to water is still sweet F.A, yet realistically how big can you actually make the train? One sixth of the size of a pumped storage plant? The return of Brunell's wide gauge and depleted uranium as the mass, then you might be onto something! lol
Sure there's a limit to how big they could make the train.
But they could add the carts, or prolonged the distance it travels
@@fitrianhidayat They could divert the power into a massive electrically driven hydraulic press. This could compress carbon into diamonds. Then those could be sold to buy Li-Ion battery banks from Tesla. If the market for man-made diamonds is too soft, then they could simply be burned in the coal fired power stations to release the energy. lol
A 5,000 HP locomotive requires 4 megawatts to run. Many locomotives are more than 5000hp nowadays.
Nice but they have to look for an fairly even, long, steep gradient to make it worthwhile.
Those are pretty widely available.
@@michelangelobuonarroti916 where? In New York City? LOL
@@davemwangi05 Nope, but plenty of hills in surrounding countryside.
Efficiency??
Or you could pump water up into water tanks and release it through turbines when energy is needed
Elevators should be generating power when they go to lower floors with fat pepole. Think about it. xD
They do already!
And how these fat people managed to get at the top ? 😅
Cool but, just dig a hole and take up a lot less acreage
That's not new. It's old, actually.
Wtf happened to a compacitor?
+Aaron Lehman A capacitor could be used after the kinetic energy is generated but this isn't electrical storage but rather storing of potential energy.
A capacitor the size of the largest oil tanker might do it. I wonder if the railroad tracks would be cheaper?
awesome !
Has anything ever become of this? I guess they could even do this a cheaper way, by having cities like NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston etc... donate their old subway cars to the project. Still functioning (but obsolete) subway cars can achieve this same result. During the night, you drive each subway car up to the top of the hill, then during the day, you let each subway car slowly glide back down the hill, thus reducing the strain on the grid during the daytime!
how is electricity sent to the grid from the cars?
embedded 3rd rail.
@@lylestavast7652
Which is the same way they even get the electricity to go uphill in the first place. Should've been obvious really.
Is this happening?
+John Arizona ,
50 MW Rail Energy Storage Project Receives BLM Approval
April 19th, 2016 by Jake Richardson
Cleantechnica Website
The Bureau of Land Management has given approval for a right-of-way lease to Advanced Rail Energy Storage for a commercial-scale rail energy storage project on 106 acres of public lands in southern Nevada. “ARES Nevada will be a world-class facility and a point of pride for Nevada. The power production is clean and renewable - operation of the project requires no water or fossil fuel, and creates no hazardous waste or emissions,” explained Jim Kelly, the ARES CEO.
rail tracksThe 50 MW project is intended to help stabilize the grid in terms of voltage and frequency. (The number of megawatt hours does not appear to have been reported about, but a page on the ARES site says a 100 MW project could have 200 MWh.)
If the project proceeds, during the 8-month construction phase a minimum of 100 local jobs could be created, with 16 full-time positions required to operate the storage facility once it is fully operational. Six sets of trains would be used on 5.5 miles of rails for the project.
The rail energy project is expected to have a use life of 40 years or more, once it is completed.
If you are familiar with pumped hydro storage, you understand the basic concept of rail energy storage too, which uses electric locomotives and train cars on rails, instead of moving water up and down to turn turbines. When there is excess electricity created by solar and wind power or when electricity rates are at their cheapest, the rail energy technology can be used to drive locomotives up hill with cars behind them. Once they are in an elevated position, the cars can be released back down the slope so their generators produce electricity during periods when solar or wind power are less productive or unproductive.
ARES says the capital cost for its rail energy storage technology is about 60% of that for pumped hydro.
One advantage of using rail energy storage is that it uses existing technology. Obviously rails, locomotives, train cars and electricity generators have existed for a long time and are proven, so they do not need to be invented or iterated over and over again to be used for energy storage in the manner of pumped hydro.
The manufacturers of the rails, locomotives and train cars play a role in the development of rail energy storage and can benefit by being able to sell their products to the developers.
Seems like a simple and easy to implement idea without a lot of technical breakthrough needed. Maybe sell the idea to someone who can actually get it done after 5 years. If he weren't so busy, I'd suggest Elon Musk.
Why not use the energy stored in Uranium atoms? Nuclear is mature technology providing grid-scale energy today!
They could see the leader of India and pitch their idea for a boost.
just 800 cars :-D
🤣
And how much enery is needed to bring the car/s uphill again? Add friction as overall energy loss and I don't think is that efficient. Maybe a little. On top consider ALL the energy needed to build the infrastructure including man hours work, materials and all the fuel consumption that goes into it. Then of course something will break on the way and all that extra energy will be lost.
Put some damn mined coal on the carts going downhill, dont sent the damn carts back down empty. Dont send them up empty..
Hm! I've just thought of this myself. Only that I know how to overcome the topography problem. You need no hills, mountains... No storage batteries on walls.
:)
It's way simpler. But I have no one to talk to about it. Well, not unless I'm willing to simply give my idea away. Which I'm not.
How will you do that by making a tunnel or what. I am currently working this topic on my Personal Project Gravity storage currently I was focusing more on hydro storage but after seeing this video I got very intrigue with this new idea . so if you are willing to share your idea with me I am all ears :)
this machine travels downward about 80 miles. but if it's travels upward from the center point just 5 or 6 miles. it produces more energy while going downward than it's upward journey.
you are overcoming and then using the same vertical distance and it is gravity that is providing the resistance and gain.
Sweet - perpetual motion problem solved !
That would work good in the mountain area of West Texas 😀👍Hey! We need that energy in our Texas super electric grid Man.We the energy Capitol.
Dude doesn't seem to know the difference between mass and volume... :/
You can out a cable from the earth to the moon and stick tour train to the cable. LOTS OF WATTS
What about elevator s
An elevator that can lift a train?
why not for tourists and they will come back home at night so... transportation and energy !!
Our internet and WiFi run on fossil fuels or anything that generates 24/7 dose it generate 24/7 You never know how long the Wind is going to be blowing and how long the wind is not going to be blowing We need something non-reliant on Weather.
Geothermal doesn't rely on weather, should we switch the world to geothermal?
Why waste money on concrete when you can just add a carriage full of heavy rocks or similar? Concrete uses a lot of energy and it’s wasteful and expensive.
or better yet, desert sands lol
I'm wondering where are obtaining all the money for these kind of projects.
If it comes from our taxes I disagree in investing in these.
They can build an small scale project so they can save money technically this will not give you 60% energy from what he states I'm not an engineer but if you do a simple math it will not give you 60% why because you have to take that car up the hill and how much energy do you need to take it back up that hill?
It doesn't make sense at all.
Rails are far more efficient than normal tires, and commercial electric motor could reach >90% efficiency if I'm not mistaken
Um, this is very similar to everyone driving their Tesla to the top of a mountain and letting it roll back down.
It’s not cheap, it’s not efficient,it’s high cost input and high cost to maintain……it’s a bit silly really..
But if you must carry on with it, can I suggest you put the CEO of Nikola in charge.
I am calling bullshit on this.
it's not BS at all - it's proven technology and very low-tech. it's just that the economics (which needs to include the net efficiency of the electricity recover AND the capital cost of the trains/track etc.) and the limited sites where this would work, just plain suck
Shows the intellectual decline in California, what used to be a great state, not anymore.
I would pick pumping water to higher altitude anyday compared to a thousands of crappy concrete weights moving up and down with so much potential to failure. On top of that this will cost way more per 1MWh of energy storage. What a waste of research funding........
Gravity generator 😂😂😂😂
I found a way to get electricity from nothing. I will tell you how it works after it is copyrighted by me
People in Africa don’t have drinking water because there is not enough drinking water in lakes and rivers for all 7000000000 people basically we ran out of non renewable drinking water
There are a lot of lakes and rivers and springs in Africa, how many of the 7000000000 people don't have any? How is your water non renewable, are you using rain water or some ancient stored ground water?
lady with budgie voice
chemistry offers better ways to solve that issue
Which one are you talking about
Or you could use Tesla Powerpack 2
If it was possible to have enough lithium batteries you could attach one to every solar panel ! It's a shame lithium is so rare.
@@dougmc666
Lithium is not rare. The problem, if anything, are lithium mining operations that are too small to meet the massively increased demand in batteries.
Though I heard somewhere even that is no longer the issue, as now it's battery production facilities.
Attention ..... from 1.18 to 1.35 listen what he says !!!!!!! he have no idea what he talking about ????? very funny (be careful engineer watching
He said mass when he probably meant to say volume.
?? You may want to explain it how u powering the train to go up hill ?? Ill stick to my free power idea generators and motors 12v motor turning 15v generator powering its self in a loop with a 12 to 120 converters
You could do even better, a 30 watt, 12 volt alternator running a 3000 watt, 110 volt generator. One hundred times more power and no converter needed!
Perhaps if you paid attention to the video you wouldn't ask that question and make yourself looks stupid
All these attempts... :) All inneficient! The best electrical storage is into people's cars at night... or their power walls.. Just make it cheaper during night. And you'll see some will program their washing machines too at night... etc.. The key IS NOT to store energy.. but use it , directly !
Veja t.co/1yxA8Hun8Y
This is silly. Flywheel storage is more compact. Or just pull this weights stright up. The lateral movements is just useless and waste of energy. You are wasting a lot of land and energy (friction) on rolling on rails, not to mention that you need to extract somehow the energy (breaks? linear magnetic generators?), and temporarily store it in batteries or deliver using some kind of overhead cables or third rail. That is silly.
Live close to diesel locomotives and haven't heard of Electric locomotives?
@@dougmc666
"Diesel" locomotives don't exist AFAIK. A combustion engine is simply incapable of delivering the torque to start a whole train. "Diesel" locomotives are really diesel-electric hybrid locomotives, using a diesel engine to power its electric motors and produce the needed raw force to get the train moving.
@@theuncalledfor - word games aren't fun, but you're still wrong.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_locomotive#Transmission_types
Just build more hydroelectric schemes for pity sakes, forget this nonsense.
Some countries have wet mountains with dams and some have dry mountains with wind turbines.
Creative, but weak yet. Thorium and fusion are the future. Photovoltaic and eolic are complementary sources.
So does that mean you shut down your Thorium reactor every night and there is no need for storage? I don't think so, in the past reactors have run all night.
DUMP AND DUMP. USE NIKOLAS TESLA TECHNOLOGY PLEASE!
I have much better invention
this is best way to produce energy going downward. but the return distance should be much more shorter while going upward. the upward track should be separate and much more shorter. this difference create extra energy.
Well try to build a model and you will see you get exactly not one crumb of extra energy.
Who cares? The point is to store excess energy when there's more wind or sun than you need, so you can use it when the wind/sun goes down.
I think you've discovered a perpetual motion machine. Long track/short track
@@dougmc666
I hope that's mocking sarcasm, because perpetual motion machines don't work.
@@theuncalledfor - Neither does long track/short track, only the height matters.