(I know it’s not the first gravity energy storage, but that’s the title of the article. There are other articles on this but they are just copying from this article or each other)
This one is a fun one because the usual YouTube sceptics called it an unrealistic idea a few years ago.
article text
In China, the first commercial-scale gravitational energy storage system is about to start operating: a nearly 150-meter-tall tower capable of storing electricity produced by renewable sources.
On the eastern coast of the Yellow Sea, in the city of Rudong north of Shanghai, the world’s first fully operational commercial gravitational energy storage system is about to come online. At first glance it resembles a brutalist residential tower: a dense concrete structure rising almost forty stories. In reality, it functions as a giant mechanical battery, designed to store electricity generated by renewable sources and release it back into the grid when demand rises.
Although similar projects are being explored in several countries, none has yet reached commercial operation. The technology provider Energy Vault, together with project partners Atlas Renewable Energy and China Tianying Inc., is now close to activating the plant. The system has already passed technical testing, has been connected to China’s electrical grid, and is awaiting the final regulatory approvals before entering service.
The technology behind the tower is called GESS (Gravitational Energy Storage System). Its principle is surprisingly simple: store electrical energy by converting it into gravitational potential energy — the energy contained in a mass positioned at a certain height. When renewable sources such as wind or solar produce more electricity than the grid requires, that surplus energy powers motors that lift heavy blocks upward. When demand increases, the weights are lowered in a controlled way. As they descend, generators convert the motion back into electricity that can be fed into the grid.
In Rudong, the structure stands 148 meters tall and occupies a footprint of roughly 120 by 110 meters. The system has a storage capacity of 100 MWh and can deliver up to 25 MW of power, providing about four hours of electricity at full output.
The EVx gravity storage technology
Energy Vault was among the first companies to invest in large-scale gravitational energy storage. Founded in 2017 by a group of Swiss researchers, the startup focuses on developing storage systems that can serve as alternatives to conventional electrochemical batteries. The technology deployed in Rudong is called EVx. At its core is a tower equipped with mechanical arms and cables that move composite blocks weighing about 35 tons along both vertical and horizontal paths inside the structure. The blocks are made from recycled materials — including waste concrete and industrial aggregates — and are stacked in an organized way inside the tower to maximize storage capacity while minimizing land use.
When the nearby wind farm generates excess electricity, that energy powers motors that lift the blocks toward the top of the structure. In doing so, the energy is stored as gravitational potential energy — effectively charging the battery by raising heavy masses. When the grid needs power, the blocks descend along rails inside the tower. The same motors then operate in reverse as generators, converting the motion back into electricity that can be supplied to the grid. The system reaches an efficiency of more than 80 percent and has an estimated lifespan of over 35 years, with relatively low maintenance costs and without relying on liquids or critical chemical materials.
Beyond the Chinese project, Energy Vault is developing similar facilities in the United States, including a plant in Snyder. The company has also expressed interest in a potential installation at the former coal mine of Nuraxi Figus Mine in Sardinia. If systems like these become widespread, the batteries of the future may look less like containers filled with lithium and more like architectural structures designed to store energy — infrastructures where engineering, landscape, and architecture converge into a new kind of energy landscape.
Can we just call these towers “pylons”? The energy storage is from “piling-on” more mass, so I think it’s sort of accurate.
We must construct additional pylons
You must construct addition “Piling-ons”!
I’ve heard about some electric dams that pumped water back into the reservoir at night to store for the next day, which I guess is also a kind of gravity battery. I don’t know if that was theoritical or real.
Yeah it’s one of the most conventional energy storages other than batteries.
Pumped-storage hydro is a super useful tech, but it’s dependent on existing natural features to make it economical. That is: a body of water that you can pump from, and then a nearby feature (valley maybe) that you can move a bunch of earth to dam. And then enough height difference that you can actually generate worthwhile energy, since that height difference is where your potential energy is coming from.
While I couldn’t tell you the exact numbers, I suspect that pumped-storage hydro would give you orders of magnitude more energy storage for how much capital you expend.
I like this new style gravity battery more because they can be built where useful and in theory may be less damaging to the ecosphere than making valleys into wildlife death zones subject to both flooding and dry-out.
gotta stock up on gravity just in case
Gotta make things go up when the sun shines
With all the concrete and steel this requires, it’s probably not economical. I kind of agree with the Youtube skeptics on that one.
What I’m guessing is that this is a strategic investment in case the supply chain for battery manufacturing hits a brick wall at some point in the future due to any number of reasons. So if China finds itself with plentiful solar electric generation capacity, but unable to build battery storage to match it… this is an alternative. And it’s an alternative with a lot shorter of a supply chain, requiring only materials and manufacturing capabilities that China has plenty of within their borders.
If the size of the battery is not a limitation, aren’t sodium-ion batteries superior in durability and longevity? I remember reading that China was investing heavily into those too.
Mechanical batteries are cool as hell. I hope they build a giant flywheel battery next
You’re never going to guess who already completed one of those like a year ago
Aren’t these things a hell to maintain tho? I’d imagine the wear and tear on all the gears, cables and whatnot is gonna be insane.
It’s pretty cool if they were able to make these actually practical.
I’d imagine the wear and tear on all the gears, cables and whatnot is gonna be insane.
Fortunately, we’ve put two centuries of R&D into making these components very reliable and relatively cheap to produce. This is basically just a tower with a bunch of hoists and regen breaking. The wire ropes, bearings, service brakes, gearboxes and motors will need regular maintenance and inspection. Their lifespan and failure rates are a known factor, so you can predict your ongoing costs with a high degree of accuracy. Industrial cranes will regularly operate for 60+ years with regular maintenance before you need to replace components. The 35 year lifespan mentioned in the article seems overly conservative to me.
The 35 year lifespan mentioned in the article seems overly conservative to me.
Agreed. That’s probably the lifespan of continuous operation, if I had to guess. After that, it might need to be shut down for deeper maintenance and retrofit. If you’re willing to do that though, these things run basically forever. We’ve been maintaining giant clocks for hundreds of years, and this isn’t much different than that.
Probably much less so than a comparable chemical battery, and you don’t need any rare earth elements that catch on fire if you look at them wrong or destroy ecosystems if spilled. Modern human civilization is pretty good at maintaining big purely mechanical doohickeys.
This is one of those quirks of physics that fascinates me, how you can turn basically anything into an energy store by just putting it really high up.
But not too high
Thats dialectics, too high results in the exact opposite effect when measured in energy. (Well energy is an absolute I guess, but we use a vector of energy to generate usable energy)
At some point, the shape, distance and rotation dominate the interaction, making it instead a fancy space elevator or a little satellite if it pops off by accident
Wow I bet we could make tons of energy by putting a huge weight, like an asteroid, near a stable Lagrange point and let its motion around it power a little motor.
Or we just let China make solar panels, either way really
we could make tons of energy by putting a huge weight, like an asteroid, near a stable Lagrange point and let its motion around it power a little motor.
I mean replace the asteroid with a whole moon and make it whatever orbit and this is basically tidal energy
But can we harness that effectively? My bullshit idea could just be a big cylinder driver for a huge cylinder engine, which i just made up
Wouldn’t the motor quickly slow the orbit of the asteroid to a halt?
well quickly is relative, you could probably get 100 years of energy for a city like that, plus/minus a factor of 10
I call dibs on robo-sisyphus
The concept makes sense to me as a layman, but how was this not already a thing? Have there been recent developments that lead to this being possible?
It was definitely already a thing. Grandfather clocks operate on gravity batteries with chains and metal weights. The issue has always been scaling them up in a way that isn’t insanely expensive: all those heavy bobs and chains on a clock can be replaced with a watch battery that’s like 1/1000 the weight and will run for just as long. However, chemical batteries–even rechargeable ones–eventually deteriorate and turn into waste. Big chunks of concrete or iron or (most commonly I think) water last a lot longer. You get much less energy density, but much longer lifespan (and using stuff that’s pretty common already). As we (speaking loosely, and not
) have started caring more about sustainability, batteries that can be made from recycled crap we have laying around and maintained like basically giant clocks start looking more attractive.The other big thing that’s changed is scale of renewable production. Most battery solutions have been focused on point-of-use storage, and there the energy density matters a lot. I can put a 10 kw/h lithium battery in a closet at my house. To store the same amount of energy with gravity, I’d have to put King Kong up on the Empire State Building and drop him off, which I cannot do in my garage. However, as more renewable energy capacity starts spinning up at major centralized locations where space is at less of a premium, the cost/benefit shifts. I can build something like the thing in the article (or a huge water pump in a reservoir), and yeah it takes up a huge amount of space, but it’s in the middle of nowhere rather than my house, and it effectively lasts forever relative to a Tesla power wall or whatever. If you’re regularly producing hundreds of extra megawatts of solar power and space isn’t at a premium, then the stability and longevity start to make the cost and size worth it.
Maybe it’s about no longer needing a guy to place the blocks just right. Also increased demand for energy storage.
/speculation
china is doing aperture science while amerikkka is doing city 17The system has a storage capacity of 100 MWh and can deliver up to 25 MW of power, providing about four hours of electricity at full output.
Can a literate person tell me how much energy this is? Four hours for how many people?
The average house in europe has a limit around 4 kW, so that would be more than 6000 houses (around 18000 people) at full power for 4 hours, make that more than double the hours or the houses considering a more reasonable, but still pretty intensive, usage.
Could you do this with water? I’m looking out the window right now at a city water tower that uses electric pumps to pull the h20 up to the storage part. Areas that have these generate the necessary water pressure for users with gravity and as a place for storage. Same concept as the weights with mgh = pe. They could pump it up during the day when the sun is out.
There are hydro electrical plants that do this with a dam.
Yep it’s called pumped hydro lol.
Works very well despite evaporation. There are large-scale experiments in China to put floating solar panels on top to reduce evaporation and help “charge” the “battery” and so far as I know they’re working well.
Absolutely, but, water isn’t very dense. A water tower doesn’t actually store that much potential energy. Dams can do it because they’re a lot taller and have a much larger reservoir.
Water is hecka dense (a kilogram per litre even) as evidenced by anyone who ever tried to carry a bucket of it. It’s over half the density of most recycled concrete
You need to store a ton of water to get decently useful energy storage, so a lot of dams do this with huge reservoirs. Relies on having high yield renewables which aren’t fully used off peak which you then store the energy from.
I have a better idea: just keep launching trains into the mountains to store energy. They can come down any time but preferably when I want to turn on the heat.
I seriously misread the title thinking it said gravy battery and I was thinking okay so you could get electricity out of it but it serves a dual purpose of being really tasty?
