I remember a few years back my health teacher told us "it's important to be educated so that when you find out that things fall to the ground, you're not proclaiming that you've discovered gravity." Now, I thought this was absurd when I first heard it, but now I'm having second thoughts...
@@nicolaim4275 C'mon, people, we science-fans and learn-enthusiasts need to stop being lazy and do recommend each other some stuff. Gimme recommendations! And have some!: Veritasium, Neil Red, Its ok to be smart, HBomberguy, Tom Scott, Kozmo.
@@nicolaim4275 Thx. I recommend Sci Man Dan, Hbomberguy, Tier Zoo, and Genetically Modified Sceptic. And just in general many with the word Atheist in the Name, just because.
@@nenmaster5218 Steve Mould, Stand-Up Maths (Matt Parker), Physics girl, It's Okay to be Smart, Smarter Every Day, VSauce, Numberphile (and the rest of the philes), The Royal Institution, 3Blue1Brown, Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell (the best one), Vihart... I am sure I am forgetting some.
Also to add to the issues with this thing, cranes have a whole lot of big and small parts constanly under stress, which means lots of wear. I work at a crane rental/maintenance hub and not a single week goes by where atleast one crane of ours has something wrong with it and needs some someone to go fix it asap so construction work can continue. They will need to build a house on top of this thing and have the mechanic live in it or something, in order to keep it running efficiently
Lol. I love the concept of just building a maintenance house on top of stuff. We can build IT houses on top of data centers, apartments on top of hospitals, etc. Lol 😆
Every engineer and physicist has those moments of “Wait this seems obvious. Why wouldn’t it work” and they usually assume they’re missing something and go and research. These people had that thought and immediately went to Adobe
I literally have these thoughts all the time when I learn new stuff, but then come to a conclusion that it's been years since this tech has been around, there's probably a reason no one's done it... and I'm right all the time...
@@Mnnvint I'm an inventor, and yes you absolutely shouldn't trust me for good reasons. I come up all the time with cool/smart/neat designs and concepts, but for some mysterious reasons they never end up becoming anything meaningful and/or useful and/or anything even remotely near practical. I am currently studying mechanical engineering in a university though, so start preparing your bomb shelter :D
Should always be the first question you ask. Why isn't this being done already? Sometimes the answer is a simple 'because we couldn't before now' and the idea may actually merit further investigation. Most of the time, it's because the idea is dumb or unfeasible due to details the visionaries overlooked, or even worse, it turns out that it is, in fact, already being done and these guys just tried to sell you old news as a revolutionary new development.
I feel like the one thing this channel has taught me is that whenever a techbro tries to come up with a "futuristic" solution to a problem, it's almost always a worse version of something that already exists.
I mean EVs aren't even new either, they've 'existed' as long as internal combustion engine based cars have! In fact in those super early days EVs WERE BETTER than their gas burning contemporaries!
That's because everyone's trying to reinvent the wheel when they should be examining the wheel and seeing if they can improve it before jumping the gun and trying to make some new flashy better thing.
@@enginecrafter7718 iterative innovation. There are two types of innovation, iterative and creative. Iterative is safe, but slow progress overall, and creative, where the whole industry jumps to a new technology. Both are fine. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time.
I'm a software developer, and "software will handle it" is ridculous. I once spent a week making time zones work properly on a website, and my boss congratulated me for the quick solution.
Can confirm. Having software be in charge of lifting and descending very heavy concrete blocks even in ideal situations would be a very bad idea simply because of the chance of error over multiple systems is high.
@@TheBlueZombie software dev here- had a similar time zone issue that needed solving.. took me several days because of the limited functionality offered by the tech stack housing the application.
@@TheBlueZombie In that particular case, I had to modify an existing library we were using, that had pretty terrible documentation, and honestly, was not meant to do the things we wanted to do with it. (imagine a gantt chart which can automatically convert between time zones, and use dst, this was not a functionality in the original library, we had to hack a lot of the rendering to make it work)
@@TheBlueZombie typical SysAdmin understand only their own field, swears a lot. Timezones are somewhat complicated as you often have different technologies (FE, BE, DB) in different locations having to manage times. So eg. when you say: "Give me all my meetings for First of February" it actually can mean different selection depending on where you are so you gotta send and store utc values but work with local time on FE. When you think you've solved it you realise background workers do not have a local time and often we cut dates in just yyyy-mm-dd which if in different timezones might not always mean the same thing. See? Not difficult but complicated
True but web software is not the kind of software that fixes these problems. Although I agree that the concept is stupid, control engineering is what would 'fix' this. The software is then just an implementation of the control strategy. You saying you are a web software developer does not confirm that this is impossible
Except that solutions like the one in the video are designed to deal with the fact that pumped storage hydropower needs a bunch of very specific parameters met to work and massive amounts of modification to the environment. The concept is sound but implementation is not always so smooth and water evaporates, so wherever it is needs access to new water and we are in a drought. One solution is to use Salt Water since we can't drink it anyways and there is a lot of coast line. Salt water causes lots of corrosion and makes the whole project more expensive to maintain. The solution he talks about having an enclosed system for pumped hydro would at least reduce the amount of water loss dramatically and thus use less water. Making more locations viable and having less impact on the environment in the area its implemented in.
@@tikityler1386 ' a bunch of very specific parameters met to work' This mainly boils down to 'a hill'. Long term, the cost of using bulldozers to pile local dirt into a hill for this is ridiculously cheaper than the ongoing costs of anything else you're going to say is somehow 'better'. It should be obvious.
Always love it when the tech bros discover something that's been around for decades. Not to say this is a bad thing though, there are tons of "forgotten" technologies that just aren't in the mainstream eye and utilizing them more can be an amazing thing.
@@ModelLights or more realistically the amount to dig a hole on the hill and to lay down concrete for the pool for the water. Along with the amount of energy lost via evaporation. Essentially there is no OP option.
As someone who works in software. "The software will handle it" is usually the marketing department or the managers engaging in magical thinking. I can't tell you how often I have been approached to implement a feature that is literally forbidden by the laws of physics that they already promised to their stakeholders with a deadline (of course before ever asking anyone with an engineering degree).
"Hey, we have a satellite sitting in geosync orbit we use for data. We need *you* to write a transfer utility so that latency falls below 50ms so we can compete with starlink. You have 4 weeks". Ummmm...
Engineer to Management: "We can't do that. It violates the law." Management to Engineer: "That only matters if people find out." Engineer to Management: "No, I mean the laws of physics." Management to Engineer: "So don't let physics find out. You have two weeks or we'll outsource your job."
"The software will handle it." "The engineers will figure it out." "The production workers will get it done." Imagine a world where marketers, salesmen, politicians, and managerials were actually held directly accountable for their promises. No scapegoats, no excuses, no delays, no bullshit. Success or failure, reward or punishment.
I’d never heard of this before and you managed to comprehensively introduce the concept and then thoroughly debunk it in less than 4 minutes. I’m impressed.
I can tell you now; the maintenance costs ALONE on this thing would be eye-watering. Anything involved in lifting apparatus has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles, and assuming these things are lifting and lowering blocks nonstop, which they would be, the lifetime of cables, bearings, pulleys, would be, at a guess, less than two years. I reckon just the cost of lubricating that thing would cost around 100k a year, probably more. Upkeep is so often kicked under the rug when they announce these big scams. Think about wind turbines - compared to this, they hardly have any moving parts Water based gravity batteries are better. Period.
I'd first assume stupidity before malice. Is it confirmed to be a scam? Most likely they might have started innocent and stupid, but once the money came in, they had to commit to this stupid Idea (or admit their folly which no one ever does).
Upkeep costs and decommissioning costs are like the two biggest blunders I’ve seen from disconnected suit. First, they build things without thinking about the costs of maintaining it, which leads them to scale things down rapidly mid-project until it’s affordable at which point the project is not accomplishing the goal set out for it. This is where nearly every single moonshot invention ends up. Second, the blunder of penny pinching executives: when they’re balancing the sheets for something, they realize they could save on all the upkeep costs by just killing the project, all while forgetting that it often costs time, money, and effort to decommission things. These costs often runs up pretty quick, and overshadow the operating costs; meaning they won’t see the benefits of decommissioning for years. 🤦♀
True. Construction cranes aren't thrown away once a buildingsite is finished, but if they only last as long as they are needed on one site it's not that serious. They will have to be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere anyway, so their worn out parts can easily be replaced while doing that. It seems that they want to use the same tech as a construction crane that will maybe work for a year in one place, and operate it automatically for 30 years?
Since the moment you said "let's fix it," I was waiting for the whole thing to eventually morph into pumped-storage in a humorous way. Thank you for not letting me down.
My original conclusion is that this type of gravity battery started due to not every geographical location having access to enough water or a place to put it. A hole filled with water would also likely need more concrete.
Pumped storage requires a lot of water (often not near where solar works best), a valley to fill and drain (or the co2 cost of building a giant pit) and a massive concrete dam (also with CO2 costs). Not sure Adam hits the mark here on this one
@@oregonNYC but wouldn't any big structure dealing with water also count as a water storage plant, with a side function of energy reservoir? I am not affirming it would be true, but I imagine almost anything being better than solid blocks of breakable concrete, even sand being used in the place of water.
@@TheCuteZombie In places where water is plentiful and there are natural formations than make pumped water easy to store I’m sure water is the better option. Last time I checked the Sahara, Gobi, Mohave etc are great for solar, bad for water. And as I said, a giant dam and big pipes require a lot of concrete too. Might be easier to just skip the water dependency part of you already need to invest in giant amounts of concrete. This video didn’t break down the CO2 comparison between a dam/pipes vs a concrete tower, but it should have done so to make a comparison as water capture requires tons of concrete.
I did not even know someone would get such a stupid idea and that it would be advertised to a large audience! I wonder how deranged have people gotten these days
@@shrujanamsyama9940 Musk being as rich as he is while 95% of his projects are duds speaks volumes on that issue. Marketing+stupid people=lots of money.
@@csfelfoldi Actually, Musk is an agent of powerful illuminati dynasties via govt. Musk was funded by govt in a desperate attempt at replacing petroleum products as oil reserves were depleting. It had nothing to do with marketing. There was a genuine desperation to replace oil and hence desperate measures were taken. But the petty innovations is ridiculous and retarded which serve no purpose
@@shrujanamsyama9940 The US government is flushing Tesla with green money to keep CO2 quotas. However that is not his only income. Just look how much money his idiotic hyperloop got from states like California and they are funding him even more to dig tiny sized metroways for underground Teslas that can transport 3 people at a time....
They were claiming 90% efficiency, which is not the round trip efficiency of pump plus hydro. Im thinking the block system but with water filled cubes would be more practical. Thoughts?
@@mokiloke Why not just lift a single massive one ton block hundreds of feet high then let is slowly comedown turning a massive generator. (Not sure why hundreds of small rocks would be needed.
@@rayharvey1330 Yep, there are some ease of engineering that make small blocks easier to cast, and cables less massive. But against that you have, as you say, just go massive, and simplify the number of moving pieces. I guess theres a sweet spot in there somewhere between, but i tend to agree, their machines had way to many moving parts which would blow about in the wind.
I gotta admit, when you first presented the block stacking my first thought "wow, that sounds interesting, but i sure hope that they wont stack them on top of each other with 0 safety measures like in minecraft."
I’d think why not use water. Use parabolic mirrors to evaporate it as many times as possible to get to the proper height during the day, then let it drain downwards to spin turbines at night. Seems it’d be a lot easier than precision stacking of large blocks. And you could even bore deep wells to increase the net height that the mass falls. Maybe a 500 ft tower, coupled with a 500’ well. Gives two things- 1st unlimited water source, and 2nd a 1000 ft drop. How the hell did he think that cement blocks was a smart idea? Edit: oh crap- they did suggest water. Lol. I left the comment mid video.
I love how most tech industry is like "so I have this idea everyone knows and has been using for tens of years but now it's "tech" so better". Remember how Peoloton bikes were valuated at 30% of the whole fitness industry despite being fancy stationary bikes?
Or Wework. But this smells more like a Theranos type of scam, you ELI5 a problem and propose a tech that you can explain the benefits of to normal people that don't understand the issue and you handwave inefficiencies and problems of feasibility as issues that will eventually be solved (maybe by software) when the current proven techs are the way they are is because they solve or otherwise don't have the issues that your "solution" has (dilution, sample size, reproducible results, etc.) Like the solar highways BS of a few years ago. An obvious example would be like a 5 year old asking why instead of smog producing traffic congestion, we just make emissionless flying cars? We'll solve the issue of lack of pilots by developing autodrive/pilot while we're at it.
@@humbleguy1533 I just wish theyd do this for an existing tech that is ACTUALLY transformative; say, crude oil generating algae, like Sapphire Energy had bred back in 2009-2010. They were literally generating crude oil from algae and selling it to the US Navy, they just had efficiency (reduction of microscopic algal predators for increased growth) and harvesting (had to be dried and pressed for the oil) issues to resolve. But honestly they were 70% of the way there before gas prices came back down, investment dried up, and they had to sell their company to a Chinese vitamin company who decided to adopt the strain for use in producing vegetable oil instead of crude oil. We literally had a real world OILIX on our hands and we let it go. Meanwhile people throw billions at Theranos. Sigh.
That's how I feel about Tesla. Its a fantastic company with a great product but its valued at more than almost every other car company COMBINED, despite the modest profits and volume
@1998SIMOMEGA Stanford dropout made the company Theranos and proceeded to scam a bunch of investors/patients with promises of a new blood testing methodology that was completely made up. The issue wasn't that they failed to produce a new blood test method. The issue was that long after they'd determined that their new test method was wholly ineffective, they continued to raise/take money from investors, ran tests for patients using their competitor's results, and provide outlooks that contradicted internal knowledge/documents. It's perfectly okay to fail, but it's a crime to hide it from investors.
I gritted my teeth when I heard of the idea of sticking it right next to wind turbines... Wind turbines are very sensitive to obstacles in the flow path of the air. There is evidence of wind parks influencing each other over distances of 70km. So building a giant wind obstacle right next to a wind park is about the dumbest thing one could do...
Wind turbines are generally stupid, BUT most areas with sufficient wind also have extremely dominant wind directions, though they may change by season. So you could put something to the side and it would be fine.
@@toomanymarys7355 i'm not a weather scientist but i would say that having 200 km³ of concrete in a big tower would affect wind patterns anywhere in the world
hmm, so why don't we use the power generated by the wind turbine to...spin up a turbine, and when there is no wind, let that turbine wind back down...BRILLIANT, can I get a few billion dollars from investors to create flywheel storage?
'Software' is the same as movie producers saying, 'We can fix it in post production.' I am industrial designer, and I am ALWAYS stunned by how these ideas never seem to account for weather, wear-and-tear and maintenance time and costs. The US Army's Alaska command always has to deal with new designs that use water in their systems. When they see that, they just put the product, reagardless of size. in the Alaskan winter and watch all of the lines and containers with water freeze and burst.
Imo he just enjoys shitting on new ideas. All innovations look crazy at first. And not every new technology has to be a general solution to all the worlds problems. I don’t see why this wouldn‘t be potential solution in specific situations.
Also, like flywheel energy storage, the problem is that one can't practically extract all the energy in the system: the energy in the bottom half of the pile is very low, and cannot be economically extracted. In reality, it would be better to start the pile on a hill of rock. Like, erm, pumped storage.
@Error 909 Not Found no it doesn't, with pump storage you have the hill so a height difference which always gives you a pressure difference, so even if your higher reservoir is not full you always have a pressure difference, here the first floor you have like 1m height difference so 1m worth of potential energy, wow
@sourand jaded you're missing the point of flywheels. All storage methods that are actually being used right now have some niche to fill and for flywheels that id very very quick responses to energy demand. They're clearly not meant for full grid storage and anyone who says they are is an idiot. Their niche is to deliver energy quickly during unexpected spikes in consumption or absorb energy during unexpected spikes in production.
The issue isn't so much with reclaiming that energy, as there isn't too much in there, compared to the total energy this station could handle over its lifetime. The issue is that half of thr blocks are completely useless, as once half of them are "lowered", there is no potential energy difference between the top rows of both stacks. So essentially, half of the blocks are just used as a spacer.
Id love to see what happens when one of those tiny ass feet that are meant to hold these huge concrete blocks breaks off and causes the whole thing to collapse like a Jenga tower.
@@jackdeniston59 Yes but container cranes do it with metal shipping containers, whereas with the video it shows cement blocks with only the edges being secured. The edges of cement crumbles over time.
I wonder if trading a gazillion small blocks for just one big massive lead weight or some other heavy material would be better. Would last longer than stone and weigh more. One big block instead of many, you hoist it up when power is cheap and release it to generate power during the peak times to pay for the cost paid to hoist it earlier hopefully with some profit. Then you have just one big block to lift so there isn't this expensive dancing orchestra of blocks. Just one big one. Goes up and down like once per day. A really big block so tons of energy is sucked down but released later. If you make just one big block I wonder if the pollution it creates to make Is less than if you made many blocks. Could even just be a big bucket built to last long term filled up with dirt even tbh. One big giant bucket would be a better idea because you could fill it up with different things. Could fill it up with some ocean water. A huge bucket. Put it in a rainy area. Idk man. Put springs under it so it reverses direction quicker when it hits the bottom. Do stuff to make if go up and down more effectively
@@TheAnnoyingBoss the fundamental problem will using a big block is the total energy stored is limited by 1 super basic formula: PE = mgh Potential energy (joules) = mass (kg) × 9.8m/s^2 × height (m) If you swap h to be kilometers then it measures kilojoules, and electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours which is 1 kilojoule per second for an entire hour aka 3600kJ of energy, the size of anything being moved must be insanely massive to even remotely be capable of storing more energy than just making a warehouse filled with chemical batteries. (Like you better be lifting a mountain) Pumped hydro works because water is amorphous so we can easily pump it from 1 reservoir the size of a lake to another reservoir the size of a lake without needing the worlds strongest elevator. Although something even simpler, use conventional hydro as your battery. It would take some restructuring of the operations and ownership of the grid but basically put a crap ton of solar panels net to the hoover dam and consider it 1 power plant, the solar works during the day and the dam stores water (letting enough flow to maintain the river's ecological health) then at night the sun stops shining and the dam turns on and provides the same generational capacity as the solar did. (Even better, they don't need to be next to eachother, just turn on/off hydro as needed to treat it like a battery, although some faster response batteries would be recommended, and the total hydro capacity of the world is finite)
it just looks really stupid . they just waste energy moving blocks around and the entire thing looks like it would need regular heavy maintenence really often because all the parts would drop in durability all the time
Adam casually improving on a "revolutionary new invention" only to turn it into an old pre-existing technology that already works much better will never cease to be hilarious.
@@aaronburns9365 The same water is reused over and over so it's not really much of a problem. All you are doing is pumping water up when energy costs are cheap and releasing it to drive a turbine when immediate energy is needed. Edit : yes this is at a net loss but it's not as lossy overall as the ridiculous crane and blocks idea and both are only used to cover unexpected high demand. It's a battery.
@@englishsteve1465 Large scale storage systems are going to experience a lot of loss from evaporation and soil seepage. It is not viable in arid climates. If it was viable then you would see more hydro power being used in the southwest. As it is there is very little b/c there is vary little water.
@@englishsteve1465 lol 😂 yer having more then one form of gravity storage is so dumb. Its not like there is more then one type of battery that would be stupid.
@@markrichardson2508 There are many forms of energy storage for systems like Solar and Wind power. Weight, pulled up and down. Spinning a big heavy wheel. Pumping water up stream. Regular lithium batteries. Capacitors for quick response. Pressured air pumped down to earth.... Oh Last time I looked up I came up with 12 or so different storages and Pumping water, batteries and pressured air were probably the top 3 in that order. CONSIDERING there are mulitple different solution as you say, why would you bring old 80s battery that is less efficient and just over all worse than many others now days? The idea that is shown as "new" was old tehcnology back in 2013 so I they are not designing anything new. The biggest difference is that you can attach new weigh to the system which is interesting. I explored one where you have weights that you can't remove like in the Anime they made. I think doing it either way is fine one just requires more stuff. You easily have system that can drive one or more weights are once and when you lower them they are active one by one and when they reach the bottom they activate next system and if you need more power you drop two or more weights at once but lose the stored energy faster. I mean, I have no clue how these systems work :d I'm just random person claiming to be Electrical Engineer...
As someone who works in the energy industry, huge round of applause. There's a goldrush in energy storage right now, and there are so many initiatives like this, where a tiny amount of energy is stored for a huge MWh price. This one is especially terrible though...
As you are someone with experience in the energy sector, which energy storage type and generator (e.g. flywheel + wind turbine) would you recommend to a household and which would you recommend to a government.
@@steemlenn8797 It's Occam's razor, this is a extremely complicated system, which generates at an extremely high €/MWH. It's unappealing for investors, grid operators and as pointed out, store a tiny amount of energy for what it is. The UK for example is currently consuming 25 GWh/h per at night and up to 45 GWh/h at peak. 4-8 MWh/h for 8-16 hours is a flea on an elephant. I'd say schemes like this are more about increasing a company's profile more than anything else. Great that it looks like something out of Fallout though
@@Vulcano7965 I'm curious about it, I haven't seen any output efficiency charts for it, but the fact they have test units in operation alone is a good sign. I'm not sure about the claim that it's scalable, but that could just be me being skeptical, if anything it's a good use of old brownfield thermal sites.
My guess is that upkeep alone would ground this idea. With a continuous running system like this, the Steel cables will eat through a wheel(pulley) within a few cycles. This device would be more offline than online and only because of service needed every few cycles.
I have a genius idea on how to make your system even more energy efficient. You can use solar energy to boil water from the lower reservoir, and then you can recondense it in the upper reservoir so that it doesn't need to be pumped. Then when you need additional energy, you can allow the water from the upper reservoir to spin the turbine and dump into the lower reservoir. I call this variation the DumbAss Modification... Or DAM for short.
I know how to improve on this idea. Use some minerals that naturally decay and produce heat to create the steam to turn the turbine, and let it recondense in a closed loop that creates constant power.
I love how I live in Tasmania, a state of Australia that produces more hydroelectric and therefore carbon zero energy per capita every year than any other state, meaning we were closer to 100% clean energy than any other state. But in 2017 the Turnbull government created the NEG, which in short forced our state-owned electricity provider Hydro Tasmania to buy power from privately-owned mainland power companies. These are the same power companies that go all "BROOO TECH BROoo" on us whilst running on mostly coal power. Coal power they're too lazy and greedy to divest themselves of, so I'm forced to use their coal while they use our hydro and wind and solar. So now, I'm forced to buy coal power from a monopoly as I can't afford solar panels for my own home. And as Hydro Tasmania privatisation is on the cards from the state Gutwein government, my power bills are probably going to soar. So now, thanks to tech bros demanding their "fair share" from the federal government and leeching off the taxpayer at great expense, I live in a state that uses 90% carbon zero energy running on coal power for several times the cost. Thanks tech bros
But uh bro, jus think about it bro. With all that energy bro we could charge one million (posts dr evil meme cry laugh emoji) teslas brooo. And they could uuuh race with their sick dope epic autopilot bro yooo and the winner turns into a pickle brooo
Yeah I remember visiting Strath Gordon Dam, such amazing engineering and makes us entirely energy independent, even ignoring how much power we practically give away to Nyrstar for zinc refining (I can't remember the exact percentage off the top of my head, but they consume a significant proportion of it) I just want a progressive government back. We have rubbish public transit, terrible housing, and now electric scooters making Hobart even harder to walk through. Woo
Wait a second. What difference does it make whether you consume energy made out of coal abroad, and someone abroad consumes energy made from hydro that your state makes in your stead? It's all the same amount of energy in total, and all the same amount of hydro energy is being generated, and all the same amount of coal is getting burned? Or what am i reading wrong? But as to privatising publicly owned energy companies: NO PLEASE NO, OK?
Another big benefit of pumped storage hydroelectricity over the "Energy Vault" is that it can be started during a blackout, while most other powerplants need some power to start up. You only need to open a valve after all. I doubt the Energy Vault would be capable of that, as the cranes need power to just get the blocks off the tower.
That Power isn't more than what you need to "only open a Valve". Hydro Plants have Diesel Generators for that Puropse, and it wouldn't be different with the Energy Vault. It's still a rubbish Concept tho
@@Genius_at_Work it is different in that you only need to open the valve once... whereas every block wastes energy getting moved off the stack. And at least theoretically you could make most hydro plants operable with human power only it would just mean the valve opens fairly slow (think treadwheel power etc)
@@Wingnut353 I have a bit Experience in your last Point. The Force required to open Valves gets ridiculous as their Size increases. I occasionally have to operate a manual Butterfly Valve roughly 70 cm in Diameter, and opening or closing it takes three Men at least 15 Minutes. And that's just the Cooling Water of a fairly small Container Ship. Plus there's a lot more to Hydro Power than just opening a Valve. Like in almost all Power Plants, the Generators must run at an exact Speed to maintain AC Frequency. This requires large and heavy Guide Vanes in the Turbines, to adjust for different Water Flow Rates and different Electrical Loads. Run of the River Hydroelectricity also needs a lot of Hydraulics for the Weir to regulate the Water Level in the River, and thus have 500+ kW Diesel Generators. Btw. said manual Valve must be closed to clean Sea Cooling Water Filters, and because that shouldn't happen very often (but may in Areas with a lot of Plastic Pollution, e.g. India), a hydraulic or electric Valve isn't worth the Money. The Valve between the Cooling Water Intake and the Filter is hydraulic, as quickly closing it is very Safety relevant. The manual Valve is between the Filter and the Suction Pipe of the Sea Water Pumps.
@@Genius_at_Work additionally, basically all big generators need electricity to function because we don't use inconsistent permanent magnets for the rotors but have DC "excitation currents" for electromagnets wrapped around the rotor to provide much greater control over the magnetic field. Obviously when the grid is on everything is self powering, but from a blackstart you need a diesel generator with a permanent magnet rotor to just get the thing turned on, or you need someone else to energize the transmission lines to give you a jump start. And you are right that "just opening a valve" is no joke. And while in theory a tiny hydro generator could be designed where 1 person could open a single valve to serve as a backup, the engineering expense is dumb compared to just using a normal generator or battery backup.
The second I hear "this idea will save the world/stop climate change" my skeptic side immediately kicks in. Big promises *usually means* big oversights
Except no one who designed the actual machine is saying that... this machine was for rural communities without access to any kind of power plant nor large amounts of water for water storage. Some randos might have claimed save the world but that was NEVER the intention or claim of this tech. Even the largest of models is only meant to provide power for a few thousand homes.
If you hear something is going to "stop the climate change", it is automatically a lie. Climate has changed throughout the lifetime of earth, so I don't think human can stop that natural phenomenon very easily.
@@Ziegeri No its not easy to stop but its definitely not natural. Decades of dumping a fuckload of carbon into the air through things like burning fossil fuels. Stopping climate change is 100% possible but it'll be hard work and dedicated infrastructure. Subsidies like what has been provided to oil and meat industries but for renewables instead. No ONE tech is going to do it but a bunch of them working where they are best suited will.
@@TheWeaponshold But then how did the climate change multiple times before even humans existed? You know ice ages and such, I would call such an event a climate change.
@@Ziegeri Yes glacial and interglacial periods. Those took place over MUCH larger time scales and much slower and the CO2 levels had never risen above about 300 parts per million and now its over 400 parts per million. Does not sounds like a lot and its still perfectly breathable but far less than that amount of change in CO2 has put our planet through those cycles before and we went WAY beyond. And we are responsible for bringing it back down or we can just kiss our ass goodbye as the planet purges us like a disease.
Also can we talk about how just rearanging them in a bigger circle arround the tower SEVERLY limits the capacity of the battery? As soon as the heights equilize your've got no more energy to take from it. Worst case scenario you can only really ever use half of the height.
"Half the height"? No, not really... If this were practical (which it isn't) you've missed the realisation that an "outer circle" of blocks could have twice the diameter... C = pi * D. Double the diameter and you can move 66% of the full height of blocks to 33% as the 'discharged' height (ie: more than 50%). Go for a 3rd ring and all of the blocks could be lowered to 16% of the full height... It's just theoretical... The idea as presented is rubbish, but the CGI version has quite a larger capacity than only 50%... 🙂
@@rustycherkas8229 you also have to worry about decreased efficiency as you stack the outer ring higher the difference in height between the inner and outer blocks goes down so you get less energy per block moved
@@kingofgar101 Right you are! One might expect that (if this were at all realistic) the selection of which-blocks-are-moved-where would be 'choreographed' to somehow optimise the energy recovery to match expectations... It's an interesting academic exercise, and it's amazing that the company's marketing wastes time claiming blocks would be painted thereby becoming a pixels in a "towering artwork"... Hope you like abstract!! 🙂 When my daughter was 3, her Christmas present was a bag full of wooden blocks... On Christmas night I tried stacking a tower using those blocks... It's amazing how an invisible imperfections in lower layers were 'amplified' up the columns making the 8th or 9th layer unstable... a stack of 60 or 80 is only possible in one's imagination, or in "an artist's rendering for marketing purposes"... Happy New Year! 🙂
@@catprog Theoretically, hexagonal blocks could be arrayed in a honeycomb pattern that would avoid dealing with the differences between rectangles and circles... Theoretically, I should be eating my dinner right now... 🙂
I visited the Grand Coulee damn when I was a kid and the tour guide explained how the pump water up into canals above the damn overnight and then let it back down to generate electricity during the day. And I thought, oh, that's smart! I mean, what could be better than that? Water is super easy to move and it doesn't break. And then a few years ago my friend's boss was talking about how much wind power sucks because we need some way to store power for peak usage times. And like, what are we gonna do? Build a bunch of batteries? So then I told him about the hydroelectric method for storing energy and it totally blew his mind. It's surprising how few people know about this and also explains why people can fall for a ridiculously stupid idea like block stacking.
Even pumped hydro can't save VRE. Still too expensive and geographically limited. Storage requirements are so enormous, that even such a beautiful tech like pumped hydro can't help it.
@@texajp1946 well, China has both money and unexplored geographical potential. Not everyone has it. And it's still not clear, how clean their mix for Olympics would be.
@@texajp1946 We've had them since 50 years ago. The Bath County pumped Storage station services the east coast grid. And energy storage is not green energy, its actually an energy consumer from the loss you get with storage. The energy they produce for the Beijing Olympics are still going mostly going to come from China's coal plants. That they store it in a battery first doesn't make it green. The green energy they're refering to is because its also a hydro power plant (not just battery). You know, like the Hoover Dam or Aswan Dam.
I actually saw the prototype in Ticino Switzerland a couple of years ago. Its just opposite the railway station in Arbedo. It was an utterly bizarre looking thing. Took some photos and found out what is was... Interestingly enough, my immediate thought was about the CO2 emissions of creating the concrete blocks. I studied civil engineering at uni and remember one amazing statistic from the materials lab... To manufacture 1kg of cement (the bonding material of concrete) creates 25kg of CO2! I cycled past it again in the spring this year (2022) and it was being dismantled. As shown in the video, an alternative to concrete is rammed earth, this is a versatile building material that's been around for millennia. Using a less impactful bonding agent (say lime) this could be a viable alternative.
One thought I had was that if you're doing it in a pit to get out of the wind, save a whole bunch of the dirt you remove & use that for the weight of the blocks, like instead of solid concrete, make them like giant buckets filled with that dirt. But yeah, water being self-leveling & the tech already exists are 2 very large plusses, & I'm sure there's a lot more energy loss to all those cables & the horizontal block movement than there would be with appropriately sized pipes.
The big problem with any kind of gravity-based energy storage system is that gravity is just not that strong a force. You need vast masses (which is what hydro starts to get you) or vast heights for the storage to become significant enough to matter. That's why this tower can only handle the approximate energy output from one wind turbine. I've seen other schemes with masses going up a hill on rails and such. If you do the math they just don't have that much capacity. I saw one that involved lifting whole blocks of land from underneath by pumping in some kind of fluid. Still seems overcomplicated but with that one, at least the masses were getting into an impressive range.
@@MattMcIrvin with a rail based system, I'm pretty sure you'd lose a lot more energy to friction & moving the engine/carriage around, especially since the grade is limited so there's a lot more horizontal motion that doesn't store energy, it costs both ways.
@@LightbringerDesigns With a rail based system you don't move the carriage around, it's fixed and the carriage is pulled by cables. You can get some pretty steep inclines with funiculars (specially without passengers), and friction losses are minimal.
@@LightbringerDesigns How about just using stone blocks like Egyptians and Mayans. Why this much emphasis on something complex as concrete? Stone blocks have minimal maintanance and nearly zero wear and tear. And can last for centuries.
im not engineer but as a tradesperson who makes prototype (and often retarded engineering) a reality I can say for a fact we could figure out how to build a 4 point block grabber work for 30 years of continuous use... would it look exactly like it is depicted? probably not.
@@mcripchip That's not the issue though. You're right the problem is solvable; we already have proof in gantry cranes, which are capable of efficiently moving large heavy blocks for decades. The problem is that the specific design they chose to show here for whatever reason is unnecessarily novel and obviously flawed. It's like, imagine presenting a design, and when it comes to the smallest, most easily solvable detail, rather than glossing over it you zoom in on a fancy graphic that reads "dunno, we'll figure this part out." That doesn't really inspire confidence.
@@ChrisG1392 35 MWh is enough for an industrial town of 4.000 people for a day of completely uninhibited operations during a total failure of energy production. You simply don't have that in the middle of a desert, neither you need that kind of a backup; a battery of that capacity could easily serve a town several times as large, which is even rarer in a desert. Also let's do some math: this thing is about 90m high (as much as a 3 MW wind turbine), and the cranes seem to be about 50m across. Pumped water energy storage is about 80% efficient, which adds up neatly: a water tower of the same size as this contraption, with a pool next to it, can store & output almost exactly 35 MWh of energy, while requiring significantly less maintenance and complexity. The amount of water contained in such battery is much less than the people using it spend over a couple months, and it can be any kind of water, including sea water or waste water from the people using such battery.
pumped hydro doesn't work as many places as the crane does. But I agree, build them underground and with a gantry crane. pumps and turbines fail same as concrete blocks, and more often. Also, when dealing with water you corrosion issues, filtration issues, etc. The concrete blocks will last a LONG time and are EASILY replaced. Guess what, EV car batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines also used fossil fuel energy to make as well. This is a bullshit argument. Have to start somewhere. Never mind the fact that concrete is far more recyclable than lithium batteries.
Now I can imagine that Adam would be that one professor in an engineering college who can give failing marks to some students who do Thesis Defense on solutions that already worked in the field.
" `Software will handle it` is the tech bro equivalent of `I have faith in Jesus`. " As a software engineer, thank you. The amount of faith technocrats put in software, somehow escaping that fact that it's written by humans (inb4 "but what about AI?"), is scary.
True, but saying „there is wind so it wont work“ is equally dumb. With that attitude no engineering problem would ever be solved. No one says a skyscraper or bridge or antenna wont work „because there is wind“
@@lukasmiller8531 Oh. I CAN be solved. Problem is that is not not doable. The problem is that after taking that into consideration is no longer feasible.
yep as another software engineer, people think our work is magic. In reality it's duct tape. The people who build real software work at NASA and defense contractors, and they follow a discipline that 99% of software engineers haven't even heard of, let alone actively use: systems engineering. also, AI is not intelligent. GPT-3 is not on the way to human-level intelligence, not even close - it's just a party trick. Just had to get that off my chest.
I like how instead of solving actual problems they "solve" already solved problems Edit: yes i know that this problem isn't actually solved so please shut up about it
step 1. find a problem with a simple solution. step 2. come up with future-tech epic bacon 420 tech bro solution. step 3. use CGI to market your "revolutionary idea" to idiots, gullible journalists, etc. step 4. profit. step 5. move to a less dystopian, European country with clean air, lower noise pollution, sensible laws, etc. step 6. sigma male grindset achieved.
As an environmental engineer I want to thank you.. a lot.. seriously. "Hey, let's stack a lot of concrete above ground."-"Wow, that's so smart! In that way we could store half the energy a hectare of forest would store on twice the area and while building it emit only twice the CO2 the same forest would store in 4100 years!"-"Yeah, nice!"-"Also it looks a lot better than the forest of course. Because who would like to live in lush green landscapes rather than a grey concrete desert." 🙈
As an environmental engineer, can you suggest another solution, which wouldn't involve destroying several thousand square kilometers for a water reservoir.
This contraption with the weights does not make sense. I have a physics and electrical engineering background. I don't even want to take the time to get in to this thing, but I can say it is not efficient.
The level of precision required as shown in their animation of lifting a single block is absolutely crazy. It assumes that all blocks will be both manufactured and placed correctly every time. It also assumes that the cables won't wobble in the slightest. Also the design shown looks extremely weak. It's a half-pipe with a half circle rotating completely out from under the half circle, with no support other than potentially a shaft near the edge of it, while it's carrying a load on the other edge. That design would break on the first occasion.
@@Grauenwolf Having 1 mounting point would make alignment when placing the blocks even more difficult as it would be more likely to twist and swing. Although it could definitely be built more sturdily and hooking in the first place could be made easier by tapering the entry point.
Hey bro, you ever played with legos? Yeah? You remember those little pin things that slot into the bottom of the other blocks, making it so your lego creation always stays straight up and alligned? Wow, did you know they already do this with concrete blocks? Meaning that it doesnt require precision at all? You just need to put it somewhere inside the range of 30 cm to connect it and then just drop it the last bit. You know what is much more precise than that? Container cranes! Which can drop a container within a centimeter or so even during heavy wind, with much less dense containers which swing much more than solid concrete or metal blocks.
@@ratelslangen What's up with the shitty attitude? If you had read my previous comment, you would have realized that I already know it's a possibility to make tapered holes for indexing. No it's not like legos, no we can't make that exact kind of system with concrete due to the extremely tight tolerances needed and concrete's hardness. The cranes shown also don't have nearly the same level of stability as those meant for containers, which by the way are a lot heavier than concrete blocks. That means that they're moved much less by wind, and it helps that we aren't lifting them up that high either. Listen, I'm not interested in fixing their design for them, someone already did that, and they used water as weights. I'm just pointing out how bad the current design is.
Uh. No. Those are not an issue. Ever seen a construction crane? They get within an few centimeters of the mark on the ground high winds or no, and they have less toe in (built in precision) on the lowering cables. This design is frankly just a pretty run of the mill gravity battery, one that happens to utilize a computer to store more energy in a smaller footprint, but run of the mill no less. All the fluff in the marking video is just to distract you from the fact that they have been used since before the first electric plant was built. Heck, im pretty sure carpenters where using gravity batteries like this to turn wood in the dark ages. And to distract investors from realizing they are extremely durable lasting generations not 30 years. That lack of built in obsolescence is really really bad for investing.
@@humanistwriting5477 Really, the only useful gravity battery has been those clocks with hanging weights, and they only last a week. Terrible idea for lathes, they were treadle powered (like sewing machines) in the olden, called pole lathes.
There is a crane that uses depleted mines for such a thing. And uses one massive dead wait and allows it to lower when energy is needed. Produces the same power with less movement
one enormous dry oil well with a giant solid lead mass seems like it would be much more energy-efficient than a bunch of blocks or even pumped storage, but at some point pumped storage may be more scalable depending on the availability of abandoned wells. At least it's still an option for locations where pumped storage is unfeasible due to bad topography and/or water scarcity.
@@ethanpayne4116 Both abandoned wells and hills for pumped storage are location dependent and finite in size and number. I personally think some kind of flywheel system is going to be a typical answer. That, or a some new breakthrough in graphene batteries or similar high density storage.
@@kindlin flywheels sound nice in theory and maybe they'll be great for high-tech facilities, but in my mind the precision needed to protect against sensitivity and risk of catastrophic failure seem way greater for flywheels than the costs of just drilling a well with existing equipment for most moderately remote sites. Maybe flywheels are more robust than that though, but intuitively it doesn't seem extreme to favor the method with less kinetic energy. I guess if we prefab the flywheels and then just install them wherever then maybe that will end up being more efficient, but idk how far we are from that being a practical reality.
@@kindlin I guess flywheels have the potential of much greater capacity, but to take advantage of that capacity we have to manufacture an extremely robust/efficient flywheel whereas a well is literally just a dumb hole in the ground.
Okay, so pumped-storage hydro actually does everything this system promises to do - awesome! The obvious problem is that natural sites suitable for pumped-storage hydro are super rare. So the questions are, how can you artificially create such a system at minimal cost and environmental impact, and could that possibly be cheap enough to be economically viable?
Making an earthen resovoir and an artificial lake on a flat plane has still gotta be cheaper then the literal hundreds/thousands of cranes you would need for this thing to compete though.
the the problem is "natural sites suitable for pumped-storage hydro" solve that instead this nonsense. instead "natural" why not "artificial"? we have brain to think not to dream only.
Old abandoned mineshafts make a good (and deep) empty cavity underground. With the "high" water reservoir on the surface. This concept is called: Underground Pumped Hydro Storage (UPHS).
As an amateur, I am puzzled by the method of picking up the blocks. Surely a handle on the top of each block would be the best solution. It could even serve as a locking mechanism for the blocks stacked on top of it.
You've clearly put more thought into this. That's how concrete blocks are made for temporary retaining walls, with a ridge on the top that fits into a notch on the bottom of the next block, and a steel bar for a lifting point.
3 days before exam "i'll study later" just to fail the test because you barely looked through your lesson 5 mins before getting fucked is more relateable to most youtube users i think :p
That's not at all what he's saying. The proper translation goes like this.... "I have come up with a stupid idea that I can use to convince politicians to send me piles of other people's money, then after paying them kick-backs I can declare the business bankrupt and move on to my next scam."
He didn't even come up with it. They idea has been around for a long time. It's even been done as a collage science project, to show how easy it is to make a cheap, low-tech battery. It can use recycled materials as weights, rather than mining rare earth elements to store power. Most models are above ground, to show how they work, but the suggested application is usually to use some abandoned mine shaft or something, to avoid having to dig new holes and cut costs. While not a terrible idea, using water does sound more practical.
Listen, I'm extremely skeptical of energy vault, but let's be real for a second about pumped hydro... Unless I'm mistaken it's pretty well established that we do not have enough suitable sites for sufficient pumped hydro storage, to say nothing of the location of these sites relative to major urban areas. Also, as we're seeing here in Ontario Canada, pumped hydro projects can get the same type of opposition as wind farms. Some of it pure NIMBY-ism, some of it legitimate concerns about environmental impacts on the local area. As I said, I'm skeptical of energy vault too. I think there are probably ways to make the basic premise of "lifting heavy things as energy storage" more practical than what they're proposing. But capping off your argument with "Why don't we just do this thing?!" when that thing is inherently not scale-able and geographically limited kind of undercuts your argument.
@@ThePixel1983 He pointed out that the _easiest_ way of pumped hydro is using natural topography. However the "dig a big hole" method would also work. The startup cost would be huge, but in theory it could be done almost anywhere. One benefit of doing a closed indoor system is that water quality is a non-issue; as long as it doesn't screw up the pumps, generators, and valves, it could be raw sewage, industrial wastewater, or whatever.
Even in the flattest of terrains, surely building a tall silo with a few pumps would require less materials than building a solid tower with massive cranes?
@@nicolaim4275 That water wants to escape in every direction at once, all the time. The blocks just need a strong foundation at ground level. Your silo needs to be strong very high up.
So the issues with pumped hydro storage are effectively the same issue the tower would have in those areas - if it's that flat, then the tower is more exposed to winds and probbly would experience the same amount of nimbyism and legit environmental concerns. The biggest difference between the two is that hydro pump storage would expect lower startup and maintenance costs compared with the tower. Which sugests we need to find more solutions than just gravity storage batteries.
It also doesn't stack up to water towers, where you will always will have potential energy stored at a minimum height. As you continue to remove blocks from the top , the max height you can drop them from and thus get energy from decreases. Heck, why build the whole thing out of the cement blocks, just build most of it with whatever material or do it off the side of a cliff and sprinkle a few blocks to drop on top of that. Cement is expensive.
@@uprightfossil6673 I was trying to think maybe there’s more energy efficiency with the crane system than the pumps or something but yeah your probably right. You know what’s great about the water system is it can also double as a cool local attraction like a park. The tower ides is just full blow AIDS.
Funny, I started watching this having not heard of this idea. Within the first 10 seconds I was thinking, surely we could get it to do some useful work, like a hydroelectric reservoir, which also can supply water to a city... As someone who has programmed computers, I also laughed at the 'software will handle it' quote - this is only ever used as an argument by people who don't understand programming, the limitations of software and the massive amount of time needed to get a buggy system up-and-running, let alone a failsafe buggy one (no such thing as a system of more than 20 lines of code that is bug-free).
The reason they want to do this is because there are a lot of areas that produce an abundance of solar power but battery storage is insufficient right now, A giant block of heavy mass is a cheaper way to store power. It doesn't have to be concrete, that's a little counter intuitive. But we are working on carbon capture, we could build large blocks out of those or some other nonsense. This video is also clearly from a place that is NOT suffering from drought or is flat so hydro wont work. There's more reasons to support this tech than there are to be against it I guess is my point unless you own a lot of oil stock.
You can get a bit more "bug" free with formal proofs, but that means bug in the sense of "behaves not as specified". Totally forgetting that in interacting with the real world, specifying everything is impossible.
Pretty dope and concise video. One potential criticism is you do need a source of large body of water as well as a terrain that lets you pump water up and down (dam or mountain). Not all urban communities have the space or geography to accommodate that. So using the underground gantry version of this actually might actually have a justifiable use casa
Or you could use the next version he showed, using water storage underground with tanks on top. This removes the issue of erosion/arranging as water can't erode/break (it is a liquid) and can be moved way easier than concrete (using pumps instead of a crane). This is almost the same as using two offset water storages, minus the location limitation but with added cost of creating an artificial container above the initial lower water storage.
@@angusheath5321 Geology is the problem. You need specific kinds of rock and geological features to get a watertight reservoir (or at least enough of one to not spring leaks that will cause erosion all the time), or you need to seal all of that with pretty expensive stuff- price for artificial pools goes up very quickly as depth goes up. The underground gantry idea on the other hand just requires reinforced walls to retain the dirt/rock- something much easier to find and much cheaper to build. The above-ground tower version is and was stupid though.
@@crosshairs007 so basically let's just use water, electrolysis and oxygen+hydrogen, it needs less space (Though efficiency, expensive hydrogen tanks, liquification of those gasses, and potential danger...)
@@Wrennbird That's like saying "Haha radioactive waste go brr." Would you like a fun fact? Hydroelectric power has the highest death toll in terms of renewables :) If you mismanage anything energy related enough, people are going to die. We know how to properly store hydrogen, and it's way less of a problem than certain *cough* other energy sources. Sorry, the cough must be allergies and not from the literal tons of waste from coal plants, that are still in service, and give off more radioactive materials than nuclear energy.
There is a similar project currently brewing in Czechia, with no silly towers but not using old abandoned mine shafts, sometimes several hundred meters deep. I see that as a more logical solution (the hole is already dug and unused)
Still with the relatively small diameter of a mine shaft you cannot store that much energy. Another issue with the mine shafts in my area; they are often partially filled with old concrete etc and they are flooded with water (shafts are up to 700m deep but water level is easily starting at 50m below the surface).
@@anneblankert2005 Projects sometimes make sense in very specific settings but not others. If you have old deep mine shafts why not use them? Price the system out and see how it works out. With a deep shaft you are basically talking about elevator technology and a generator. It's not like trying to develop new battery chemistries and scaling them up. I suspect there are some places where this could be done economically. Old mine shafts, if they are dry, might not be good environments to introduce water, so water pump systems with a closed loop might be more expensive. No single solution is going to fix everything. I think we are starting to look at better batteries for storing the base load now. For years if you wanted to store power you just kept some coal handy. Then, when we started doing batteries it was for all high density applications like walkmans and phones and electric cars. They were designed to be light weight because they had to be portable. Now that we are looking at baseload storage scientists are looking at new chemistries that don't worry about weight. They focus on cost instead. It doesn't really matter if your battery weighs a lot and is a little bulky if it's sitting in your basement where your furnace used to be.
All other considerations aside, how are they going to ensure that the fully built tower of blocks is stable? If you were building a permanent tower of concrete like that, it would be necessary to tie all the blocks together with steel ties or similar. As it is, they've just got a tower of loose blocks - I wouldn't go within a mile of that thing. Bear in mind, these wouldn't have been carefully fitted as with traditional stonework - they've been stacked automatically at a rapid rate and get un-built and rebuilt every few days - how long before it falls over?
Imagine an earthquake topples all of those blocks. How much stored energy would be lost? How much energy would have to be expended resetting the whole mechanism?
@@theunkownbanana1823 I would imagine many of the blocks would suffer damage and chipping so would be unusable. And the machinery would likely be severely damaged also, quite likely by falling blocks.
I feel like people are forgetting the biggest problem with this; what if these tall skinny towers with nothing supporting them, fall? There’s literally no skeleton or anything to hold these in place. If one of these things gets swayed by the wind while being lifted up/down and it knocks the tower, it’s gonna be a super high tower of concrete bricks crashing to the ground followed by 5-6 cranes. That sounds safe!
I remember musing on the idea of "gravity storage" years ago. Then, I sat down and did some basic physics calculations and realise the scale of weight (or height) needed made it impractical when using solid weights (I was thinking of storage for individual homes). It is remarkable to see that someone spent more than the $0 and 20 minutes I spent thinking about this and concluded it made sense to move forward.
Oh, what a coincidence! I did exactly this about a year ago as a potential alternative to batteries for individual homes, and came to the same conclusion 😂 Sadly it just doesn't scale very well. But I do think it'd be a cool fixture in some sort of "art project" type home.
See also "Hyperloop", neat idea until I thought about how power it would take to pull the vacuum. You quicky get back to planes or high speed trains. If CA would hear this and cut their losses it would save them many Billions$$$
Lol. I love how you went back to pumped storage as the solution. The moment you showed the tower of vricks I thought "This is stupid, we can pump tower into a resevoir and use hydroelectric damns that aleady exist to reclaim said power. People have been suggesting it for decades and it would be cheap and effective" Your attitude when you got to that point just made my day. Thank you.
@@BobSacamano666 That's true. But this whole idea is about storing energy for later use and is based on the fact that electricity prices varies throughout the day. So when the price is cheap the water is pumped up, and when there is high demand, the water flows down and turns turbines to meet the demand. Tom Scott did an excellent video, search for largest battery.
Hydroelectric plants are indeed used to store energy in some places. Tom scott made a video titled "Britain's largest battery is actually a lake" on the topic.
I remember when I first had a similar idea to this some time in my high school years. I was imagining massive concrete monoliths in backyard that can be raised/lowered depending on renewable supply. Did some quick napkin math and realised that you'd need such a massive pile of concrete to just cover the energy needs of one household that the entire idea wouldn't be feasible. Not even considering the impact of CO2 emissions etc. And then afterwards coming to the same realisation that dams already exist.
Learning never ends, so here you go, have some RANDOM comment trying to give you Fun Science-Times: Veritasium is cool, but Hbomberguy is even better. Practical Enginnering is also recommend-worthy, just like Neil Red, It's ok to be smart, Oversimplified, CGP Grey, Tier Zoo, Kozmo, Sci Man Dan, Bob the Science Guy, Creaky Blinder. And Legal Eagle and Cinema Therapy also are very educational, but these 2 are noteworthy for offering a very new viewpoint for old things.
@@ziad_jkhan how about a floating dam in the ocean? Basically a bit floating porta-pool that can keep a large body of water at a higher elevation compared to that around it. I wonder what type of materials it would even take to contain it.
@@ziad_jkhan Yes, and they also bring other issues. Either you lose a valley that used to be dry in order to hold the water, or you also lose the fishery that was supported by the river, as fish and dams don't play well together. We've been tearing out a bunch of ours in recent decades because we didn't need so much power and the damage to the fisheries was so large. The Grand Coulee Dam has never been run at 100% of it's theoretical capacity as there's never been a need to install generators in the remaining positions.
@@anon746912 buoyancy only works if the density of the upper fluid is lower than the bottom fluid. In other words: if you fill a ship with water, it sinks. So if you want to keep a large body of water above the ocean water level you'd either have to fix it to the ocean floor or have a much larger "ship" with an air gap below the water tank in which you'd fill just the tank above that air gap, and that air gap would likely have to have a larger volume than the water tank itself
It is astonishing that investors would back this idea. One ratio that is out of whack is the required investment per kWh of energy storage. Cranes are very expensive pieces of machinery. Touchy, sensitive, and requiring great skill to operate and maintain. The video mentions wind, the mortal enemy of tower cranes. The usual rule is that you must shut the crane down before the wind hits 40 mph. The maintenance expense would also prove to be a problem. The ropes wear out and have to be replaced regularly. It’s a big, expensive job every time. The structure also develops fatigue cracks that require expensive repair performed by skilled ironworkers and welders. The “duty cycle” would be equivalent to near constant operation moving the full rated load. Very destructive. Finally, utility-scale capacity would come only with immense outlays. This thing is an expensive toy and a science experiment that will serve to test things that are already known. It’s not cost effective, and this could have been shown on paper without building a thing.
No its like when you actually did listen in physics class, but only up until the point where you take gravity as a constant, friction and air resistance are negligible, wind doesnt exist and things dont break ever.
The physics is correct though. It's the implementation that being criticized. Like why use concrete to store potential energy when we can just use water? The largest pumped hydro 'battery' station in the US is in my state and it's been operating since 1985. The issue with pumped hydro is it only works in very specific geographies.
@@delos2279 The physics in the video is correct, and this could technically serve as a battery, but the assumption that it is in any way an effective battery is not.
@@5h4d0w5l1f3 It is effective as a battery though. That was even conceded in the video. And mechanical batteries are generally more environmentally friendly than chemical batteries. The claim was that pumped hydro is better. Which is true. But that's true of hydro power generally, not just gravity batteries. The issue Adam didn't realize or left out is that geographically pumped hydro, like all hydro, is extremely limited. Most of the areas that support it already have it. Hydro is generally the best form of power so Adam might as well have been condescendingly saying 'just live near rivers and mountains.' That's not making a point. Generally don't look to youtube video essays as a reliable source to debunk scientific research. Maybe your science classes were not advanced enough to learn that.
Their last iteration of the idea actually has a gantry crane stacking blocks in a square building formation rather than a round tower. Looks like someone was taking notes from this video.
That was the plan all along. Pitch something interesting and plausible to non-experts, get their investment, do pretend research fixing problems one by one that are already known to experts, deplete the funds. Declare the failure. Rinse and repeat with a new idea to new investors
I once thought water towers could act the same way and then an engineering friend looked into it and he basically said batteries are already better so I dropped the idea.
Well I mean they do and they don't sure a battery can hold a larger charge for cheaper but said battery ages so it needs replacing and also that is without mentioning location and temperature. Any and all batteries don't like cold or hot (well except for some exotic batteries but those haven't reached real production yet) or even better is that it allows for amplification of local hills and valleys making what would be a mediocre hydroelectric battery into actually worthwhile. Sadly though while their maintenance at least long term looking at current battery technology modern electric pumps are really really efficient at what they do meaning there is little room for the tech to improve in a meaningful way unlike batteries. They do still have uses even then though!
@@gemmasterian4496 Even modern mass produced LiFePo4 batteries have full cycle charges in excess of 3000, while remaining above 80% capacity at the end of their life. Full daily cycling is around 10 years, and with much better density and deployment locations, and they're likely to work well beyond that. Compared to the maintenance on a series of cranes and concrete....
Batteries are not better than water towers, because water towers have already been built in large quantities. Your engineering friend didn't consider all the variables.
pumped storage is great, but it does require favorable geography and oftentimes flooding existing developments. That is just to say it isn't idiocy to consider other forms of gravity storage. though, yeah, this tower is dumb. if you are in an arid climate or land area is at a premium, maybe you just have to rely on chemical storage? what do you think
@@bable6314 it could be a battery or some other chemistry like making hydrogen. certainly, if done properly, the risk of explosions is well mitigated. Batteries (in the general sense of chemical, gravity or other forms of storage) are completely essential to get off fossil fuels (which all also explode by the way). chemical batteries are not a significantly larger risk than existing technology
The heavier weight of concrete or stone does have the benefit of higher energy density for a height traveled which is similar to another old technology called a hydraulic accumulator. Basically, a big vertical cylinder with a heavy weighted piston. Water is pumped into it, lifting the weight to store energy. The constant-ish pressurized water was then available to run hydraulic machinery. Historically this was used to operate cranes and other heavy machinery with earlier steam engines
Sure but that isn't really an issue, is it? We have plenty of space and plenty of (non-drinkable) water. Any efficiency you gain is simply obliterated by how simple and effective a hydro-electric battery is. Economies of scale galore.
Unlike the extremely simple mechanics of a water storage system, Energy Vault relies on multiple complex crane systems all working in complete synchronization. A single point failure would render the entire system inoperable and repair logistics would be measured in days and weeks rather than minutes and hours.
@@sybrandwoudstra9236 Flywheels are all but useless for anything but very short term storage and even at that the efficiency is marginal. And please don't bother coming back to me with a bunch of hype from yet another Kickstarter company with nothing to show but a bunch of CGI concepts.
And one more thing.... crane ropes need inspections, greasing and changing more often than you think - 6 of them would most likely see 5 in action at any one time. Great video :)
@@outlander234 perhaps, I did a quite bit of googling, it seems both crane ropes and thing such as turbine blades need an inspection twice a year, however the wind turbine blades can be done in some cases with a drone/magnified photography. Crane ropes are layered in grease and must be inspected manually.
"6 would see 5 in action" Make that 4, I think. Because it looks like the cranes are supposed to serve as counterweights for each other, and a big crane without a counterweight is bad news.
Yet another point you didn't consider: This concept only ever makes sense if there is any actual height difference between your blocks. And the less height difference there is, the less energy you can extract. So your "empty" situation basically is all blocks at the same level (so you _could_ replace the "inner" block up to that level simply with a solid foundation), and the lower your storage goes the less efficient your system becomes (because you have constant time attach/detach operations -> the lower your delta goes the higher your waste). And lets not even talk about the crane arms travelling empty half of the time.
This isn't revolution, this is just a logistics nightmare. These people should try and play Factorio or Satisfactory so they could learn a thing or two about thermodynamics...
@@ruffusgoodman4137 These people should go to school instead of playing games, lol, at least learn some first-year physics. But the problem isn't intellectual and educational deficits in these CEO types. It's the intellectual and educational deficits in the shareholders - any idiot can buy promises made by any idiot if he's got money to invest.
@@pwnmeisterage A good point. And there is another issue with the cranes which i haven't seen mentioned so far (unless I am missing part of the point OP is making) Not only is attaching and detaching wasting time, but the whole lifting process is - the higher the tower gets, the worse the problem becomes (part of the reason why it takes so long to load and unload container vessels). The further a crane needs to travel - both up and down and side to side - the more time it takes. Therefore it has not only a limited energy output capacity, but the energy intake capacity is similarly limited.
@@pwnmeisterage I meant the games as to patronize his seemingly ignorant mind. Games help a troubled head to get along with science (sometimes. FFS Fortnite isn't a useful game for instance)
It's so they can "write off" the "loss" when it "fails" for what they put in, lowering their taxable income, so they aren't hit with the high rates, and get to keep more of their income... and get a huge tax refund in the process.
What we need is to take money out of the angel investors hands and make investment about smaller micro investments then this stupid shit can die in a trash fire and anyone who pulls like a Fyre festival would never see a dime of investment again. Aka I’d never see the word Elon ever again and the word musk would be reserved for books about beavers
And I was so looking forward for these self building Jenga towers. 😆 BTW, people give wind turbines a lot of criticism for being too noisy. You think a thing like this wouldn't generate sound? Living next to this would be like living next to a permanent construction site!
@Madolite yeah some people don't seem to realize if you're going to make a useful renewable energy generation option "put it in the middle of buttfuck nowhere" is a very useful option to have
@@iShionSinX Placing power generation on the outskirts of cities is good thinking, but it can't be too far away! It costs energy to transport energy. Long distance cables need to be built of better and better materials the longer the cable length or you need to have transformer outposts every once in a while to regulate power. It gets pretty expensive to maintain the network. People won't be able to afford the electric bill.
@@robdom91 true. Even though you can place it in the middle of nowhere, the closer you can put the generator to where the electricity is going, the better it's gonna be.
As an engineering student, I was blown away the first time I saw a pumped storage facility in the '80s - unfortunately the idea did not gain much momentum under a reagan and watt government - odd right?
This made me go from "This block tower idea is pretty interesting" to "this block tower idea is stupid" within minutes. I gotta say, that experience on itself is the most interesting.
@@haoxuan7909 lol is this what things have come to? can't deny me opinion, the dude litterally changed his mind in 5 minutes. i hereby forfait any future social credit gain in the name of doing whatever i want. can keep ur points and give em to those that give a damn about them ;-)
@@SebastianA.W. Just waving away curiosity is what causes people to double down and think bad ideas are good, don't be a dick and immediately make fun of people who are curious, teach them so they can be curious in the right direction.
@@SebastianA.W. people need to consider implications. Being introduced to a new idea that solves a problem will initially sound good, especially if you are aware of the problem beforehand. This video introduced a solution to a known problem, gave some pros before talking about problems inherent in the solution. The format of the video, including the title and the thumbnail, is making people go from "good idea, why not do that?" to "oh, that's why it's bad". Accusing anyone of being gullible because of this is either being ignorant or being a jerk. This video takes curiosity and teaches to apply critical thinking. It is acting to oppose gullibility. It is educational about the concept by using a real life example. The whole thing is too well done for the video to simply be about the energy storage via gravitational potential energy instead of electric potential.
As Peter Thiel said in his book, "green energy" companies are headed by salesmen, not engineers, so it often ends up going nowhere after the initial hype. Those guys are like kick starter gurus but with access to bigger bag of cash.
Right now the main point of green energy is to generate votes, not energy. It's why the same people who are against fossil fuels are also against nuclear energy: they want that lowest common denominator vote for themselves, not for the environment. They aren't interested in what happens with energy after they're in office.
@@RendezvousWithRama Still doesnt mean you shouldn't place your votes or interest in the party that actively wants green energy, rather than the party who lets oil companies run rampant without regulation, and rally against any form of green energy
As a mechanical engineer, I can imagine the maintenance nightmares of this thing. This is nothing other than science fantasy by someone who barely knows how real things work
Exactly. I've designed winches and cranes, and I see so many cost and reliability issues. Those cables wear out pretty quickly when they're used continuously, like on rope shovels. And they're expensive, and take some time to replace. I think they skipped the whole feasibility study phase of this project. Or else it's just a big scam.
not only that, but it is financially unfeasible. the more time i devote to thinking about this stupid tower, the dumber i feel, and it wasn't even my stupid idea!
@@lolaa2200 No. Fantasy implies a mystical element. You know, like witches and dragons. Science fiction has become reality before (but not nearly as often as you'd think, nor in the ways you'd hope it would-personal flying cars that use antigravity, multi-mile high skyscrapers, or faster than light travel still have yet to become realities and possibly never will. But hey, we've gotten the 60s Star Trek communicators, and ours can do WAY more than theirs could).
I just watched a video that explained the problem with pumped hydro: the energy density is very low. You need to have a huge reservoir with as much difference between the top and bottom portion as possible. So, you can't put that just anywhere. And I will add that evaporation is surely an issue in some places. So, we're looking for an alternative gravity battery. Maybe this design sucks; so, what else can we come up with? I like the idea of rolling a really heavy train up a hill or something. No, I don't know how the control of moving it up and down would work.
I proposed my own idea of how this could work recently. While not a detailed explanation, maybe you could better flush out the concept? Any contribution or differing ideas will be happily appreciated.
@@caydenwootton7293 , I found a lot more under the term "gravity battery". And apparently these things are being built and used, though it appears to still be a pretty new technology. For the most part, it looks like a weight held by cables is the way, though not like that stacking thing.
@@eeberee really? He brought up few points of which he doesn't have any proof to back it up if it's really a "issues" and then in the end he's solution is something that already exists. I first thought that the guy was trolling but based on content I found out that he was actually serious. Now question is how serious is he's audience?
Oh but also water isn’t available everywhere and concrete is used in dams too so it isn’t really a fair comparison without showing numbers , they aren’t perfect either
This concept does sort of exist on a very small scale. There are lights designed for third world countries that are powered by a heavy bag being slowly lowered to the floor. Every 30 minutes a person picks up the bag and resets the device. Good for kids doing their homework. So I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if a larger version has a niche. There are certainly places where water is scarce, or where hills are scarce, which makes pumped storage hydro either not viable or far less viable. Maybe a remote desert base? Bring the crane and some bags, fill the bags with rocks. Not sure if that’s better that a chemical battery, but it might be cheaper, or lighter within very specific capacity and discharge rate requirements.
@@awl649 Individual people have activities, sure, but generally power consumption goes down considerably during the night. A power plant based on burning organic waste from farm production and food consumption could compensate if the rest of the system is predictable.
With LED lights efficiency and battery costs, I doubt the dynamo method will last. Simple low-quality solar with a cheap battery attached to LED lasts all night. Just look at this lawn solar lights selling for $2-3 each
@@nicolaim4275 Antarctica has very little liquid water (pumped storage doesn’t work so well if water is a solid), same with the arctic. They have several months a year without daylight, let alone good conditions for solar panels.
I always wonder if people who make projects like these KNOW they're selling nonsense and are cynically hoping their cool CGI will be sufficient to get some sweet, sweet investor money or if they genuinely believe in their own nonsense.
The first one. When you think about the problem of energy surplus and deficit, you are smart enough to Google things. Those are "smart" frauds nothing else they try it 5 Times. Some money will Flow in eventually
To be fair, I can't blame these people for wanting to dupe reddit kids so they don't need to work again. I mean you have the choice of, work as a waiter at minimum wage or go to university for a couple years and then make a CGI presentation. Its all a symptom of our broken work place.
Now, not to defend the gravity storage with concrete blocks, but water pump storage does have problems, that this solution doesn’t have and therefor might be applicable in a use-case. As an example absolutely flat terrain with little to no water.
Using physics principles it should be the same. But only in a frictionless and vacuum world. Probably still had better energy retention than a battery though.
@@joshuaa7266 At 1:57 it said "90% round trip efficiency", but of course that could easily be a very optimistic number for promotion. It also shows, at 1:10, that the diamater roughly doubles for the dropped blocks compared to the stacked blocks. So 3 times as many blocks fit into the lower pile (2^2 - 1 for the original stack), such that they will be at even height when the original stack is at 25% of its max height.
This project immediately goes from 'this is neat' to 'it'll never work' when someone brings up wind or damage. If one block on the top cracks and the crane can't grip it, then that's a whole section of blocks stock under it now made useless until it can be removed. Or, if one block lower down starts cracking then that is a massive danger where who knows how much of the stack could fall over in almost any direction if things get worse. Medium scale pumped hydro for areas that can't fix larger stations would be much much more feasible than this Jenga battery.
There are a lot of alternatives that is being developed because of specific problems with pumped storage hydro-electricity. th-cam.com/video/mHmIVw9etns/w-d-xo.html here is a very nice video showcasing all the "real options" and not just some futuristic cgi. Like they actually used real science, and they showcase the problems with it and how they think they can avoid it!
You could use modified hasco blocks full of gravel or dirt and just ditch the concrete block idea altogether. Doesn't make it any less useless in any other capacity, but it could work.
the only good things about these "futuristic energy devices" and "transportation-fixing marvels" are that they look cool from an untrained eye and that's it
That's not the only problem. The other is that the energy you get per area of water is generally quite low. So it's utterly infeasible for scaling up. This is one way the concrete is actually better, though I am not sure why you'd use a million tiny blocks instead of a few large ones.
@@satekeeper Concrete is kinda dumb though. The point it is not drastically more dense than water is valid (this video is terrible, btw). Metal would be a much more long lasting and energy dense solution, which would make it easier to compensate for its carbon cost.
@@louisvictor3473 or for that matter you could just use rock. Concrete is a great construction material because you can shape it to whatever form easily. But for a gravity energy storage system with just a few large weights, you don't need that. Then you get higher density and low carbon cost
THANK YOU So yeah the idea to use the same principle isn't too bad. But using a much simpler design as shown towards the end of the video is a must. Why not just a warehouse with a sentry crane?
I love how in your latest videos you bring it around to existing "innovations." You prove a thought I had for along time - investments in "cool technology" might make people feel better because we like to think of ourselves as this brilliant species that makes stuff, but in my mind it's time and resources that could be spent on... hmmm, I don't know land and water conservation and regenerative agriculture subsidies to make sure the right practices of producing food are incentivized.
Exactly. We're a species that, unfortunately, frequently confuses snake oil salespeople for innovative geniuses because we're hard-wired to want an easy, low-effort solution to a problem. We believe what we want to hear, which unfortunately is normally "now, just give me all that lovely money, and in return you shall have this new shiny thing that will solve everything...thank you and goodbyeeeeeeee!"
@@peterclarke7240 Learning never ends, so here you go, have some RANDOM comment trying to give you Fun Science-Times: Veritasium is cool, but Hbomberguy is even better. Practical Enginnering is also recommend-worthy, just like Neil Red, It's ok to be smart, Oversimplified, CGP Grey, Tier Zoo, Kozmo, Sci Man Dan, Bob the Science Guy, Creaky Blinder. And Legal Eagle and Cinema Therapy also are very educational, but these 2 are noteworthy for offering a very new viewpoint for old things.
We are a brilliant species that makes stuff up, that's why we already came up with those innovations. But we also like to think there are those revolutionary singular geniuses instead of everything actually being invented by evolutionary iteration and collaboration.
It's called ecomodernism, look it up. It's all meant to profit on our collective eagerness to buy the easy solutions, while distracting us from the real solutions.
Old railcars corkscrewing around a hill, fill 'em up with rubble, old concrete and heavy crap that was going to get landfilled anyway. Use the rails as busbars or run some overhead wires, and you have something that can store a whole bunch of potential energy in areas where water might be at a premium. This isn't exactly a new idea either, but I guess it doesn't look as pretty in CG.
@@onder6072 OK, now I'm imagining a steampunk-type society where their whole problem-solving culture is built around "How can we do this with a train?"
"Software will handle it" and that software will need to developed, tested, constantly (and I mean constantly) updated, have multiple, fail-safes and You'll need hardware and machinery optimised for that software and all that will add TONS of cost
While the energy vault is dumb, pumped storage hydro is very location dependent and the footprint is a lot bigger (and evaporation / seepage / weather / water use concerns). We can store energy thermally in rocks - create well insulated boxes full of rocks and connect them to a heat exchange loop and a turbine. Excess energy in the system is used to heat water (100% efficiency) and then when you extract it, it drives a turbine which is normal efficiency. Perfectly scalable, tamper-proof, engineering so easy it's boring, applicable to literally any environment, mobile, cheap as rocks. If you replace rocks with water in this set up, similar to as described in the video, you get a higher energy density (for an application that is very scalable so why?) for the trade-off of thermal expansion, corrosion, water vapour pressure, easily tampered with, sloshing during transport, algal growth, contaminants, etc. So I think hot rocks in a box could be a better solution than all this techno-marketing bullshit, and possibly better than even hydro storage.
You can couple this with compressed air storage, too - the thermal reservoir takes up heat during the compression phase and adds it back in when released.
Yes, it is location dependent, but most countries have pretty well developed electrical grids so they can put their storage anywhere. As long as the country has any kind of suitable location anywhere near its grid, it could use pumped storage. I imagine a few very small, very flat countries might not be able to manage it, but most countries would have somewhere with the right terrain to do it.
- Pumping a mass of water is less efficient than lifting an equivalent solid mass with a pulley - Pumped storage is only efficient to implement when the natural landscape facilitates it; "energy vault" does not have this restriction
@@gershommaes902 - Energy vault is limited to an extremely small capacity, and loses potency fairly quickly on "stored power" the further up you go. -Energy Vault is absurdly higher in cost to maintain, most likely also requiring considerable earthworking to make viable in the slightest... And benefits more from water, less failiures more efficient far simpler, far longer lifespan. You can most *definitely* put them all over. A hill is not a rare occurence, hell anywhere with even a mild slope could be a viable canidate, it simply has to be high*er.* Further out of course would mean more pump work, unless you create another aquaduct/pipe in the opposite direction feeding back. Or simply more involved earthworks and engineering for something of a MUCH higher capacity, with a MUCH larger lifespan, with much simpler process to maintain. No advanced components that could easily fail, or fuck up too badly. You do have the risk of a failiure of course, however with the hydro route, you can easily design a suitable failsafe channel. (Unless some jackass "improves" your design 20 years down the line, overloads your design, and overloads the failsafe entirely)
@Professor Frog Hey, where's your furry pfp? Or MLP/Anime Pfp? Which one's worse than a furry? Either way it needs to fit your comment. "Where are hills? Do they just appear/exist on their own???" Yes, it's called Terrain. Landscape, Geography. The Romans knew how to take advantage of it. Maybe you should stop looking stupider than a primitive civilization 2000 years gone?
I love your short form of this! Who knew that stacking concrete in a cylinder in windy areas surrounded by mountains wasn't the most ideal form of energy storage?
Another thing with the cranes is the more you use the battery the less energy you actually get back out of it. A block at 100ft is going to net you more energy than a block at 50ft purely due to the height. So unlike traditional batteries and even water systems, the output is going to slowly start diminishing as you use it which makes it unreliable and kinda stupid
Even as an engineering student, this just seems incredibly stupid to me; it seems incredibly unsafe, even if it were mostly isolated away from people by being placed in wind farms, by being composed of loose bricks. A 4 year old could tell you that stacking blocks up high loosely is a bad idea.
@@UlrichRoss stone cathedrals are held to gather with mortar, not free stacked like this structure would be. This is a giant Jenga tower and it wouldn't be a question of if it would fall, but when.
@@UlrichRoss Actually in all the big cathedrals they had to come back later and add steel straps and pulling bars so that it doesn't tumble down. Of course in the CGI virtual visit you don't see them (it's software ;c) ) but if you have the chance to visit one for real you'll see theses.
Honestly, even if we just stick to the idea of "lifting and releasing something very heavy", why not just have one VERY heavy block (possibly made out of un-recyclable waste materials), which is lifted higher and higher with energy surplus, and then released gradually when the energy is needed? What's the point in stacking a bunch of blocks?
How high would you put a single block? That sounds ludicrous. Also, the cost of raising something up with a cable increases exponentially with total height, as the cable has a mass and needs to support itself. It's a very common problem in long elevator designs.
Yes, this concept exists adn operates in some places. Using old mine shafts that go down deep enough and have huge ass elevators already. Scaling up to a lot of locations becomes a problem though
- Pumping a mass of water is less efficient than lifting an equivalent solid mass with a pulley - Pumped storage is only efficient to implement when the natural landscape facilitates it; "energy vault" does not have this restriction
Instead of a bunch of blocks, my concept was a single mass (per station) of a bunch of waste materials in shipping containers that goes up/down incrementally. This would also allow for that mass to lift a heavier mass an increment when it is full. Other ideas include pressurized air (we could perform some chemistry at high pressure to only release oxygen and nitrogen back into the atmosphere
Short, sweet and straight to the point. And as someone who works in tech, thank you so damn much for pointing out that "software" isn't frikkin magic pixie dust.
Oh come on you need some faith in software Jesus But seriously. People who think you can just defy logic and laws of physics with software are just brain dead. Why not just create free energy with this magic software? Cut out this concrete middleman and create perpetual motion machines and free energy creators with this software fairy.
@@tzenophile Okay... Connect that stable drone to the lower end of a massive, dangling cable (many times the mass and profile area of the drone) that is being whipped around by unpredictable gusts of wind, and give the drone a massive load (the block grabber with its actuators that must be failsafe), also swinging in the wind, to be precisely oriented over a block that butts-up against other blocks... If one of the four actuators fails, Murphy's Law says it will fail 80m above the ground, and the grabber cannot be moved without risking toppling a 35T block of concrete from the top of the stack... Good luck with that! Once one incident happens, the entire storage battery must be shutdown until its perfect operation can be resumed...
It would be interesting to see a bit more delving into pumped hydro without the hill. Pumped hydro with a hill is surprisingly difficult to create: it needs very specific terrain to work well. It's great if you have the right terrain and low population density, say northern Scotland, or the Azores. But it's not a scalable solution for most cities.
True, but the problem is the cost. These sorts of hydroelectric power storage are already super expensive to build. Adding an artificial replacement for natural hills would make it even more so. Maybe this would still be worth it for certain areas, but I think standard industrial batteries would probably be a better solution for space-limited areas.
*Although I like a few of his videos, but the arrogance with this guy is just through the roof.* If PSH worked for every case there wouldn't be any need for any other storage solution (Plus they are expensive, need specific topography, and destroy environments). So what does he suggest : - Stacking the blocs in a wall-like structure to help with the wind *chuckle* - Digging a tower deep hole once again to help with the wind (cost, feasibility, sanity really...) - Creating a lake deep underground, then putting another lake on top of it, with the turbine is at the same level as the top lake *intensive facepalm* I won't go into the details about why this video (and many others on this channel)is a sham, maybe pull the wool over people's eyes, and as someone working in the field, I feel insulted.
I think density is really not a big deal in this case. I live in Belgium (20th country in term of density) and there is one. I can tell you it takes very few space, and we are not living on top of each other so i guess there is plenty of space to build that in other countries. See Coo Hydroelectirc power station
What about, you know, where there is something, let's call it an electrical grid, that allows you to produce electrical energy in one place while storing it in another, better suited place. Sounds totally futuristic, I know.
@@DarthChrisB There's always some loss in transmission, though that's fairly minimal compared to the efficiency of the actual storage devices. Still, if you saw the Last Week Tonight episode on power grids like I did, you know that a shift to renewable energy production will require a massive overhaul of transmission grids to get power from the windmills/solar/hydroelectric generators to the cities.
In Norway, it is common for hydropowerplants (which we have hundreds/thousands of) to pump up water when there is excess power (such as when there's too much wind in Denmark and we get the power for free). The energy loss is only roughly 30%. Pretty neat.
I remember a few years back my health teacher told us "it's important to be educated so that when you find out that things fall to the ground, you're not proclaiming that you've discovered gravity." Now, I thought this was absurd when I first heard it, but now I'm having second thoughts...
It's a good line, but in this case it also applies to not getting swayed when someone else claims to have suddenly discovered gravity.
@@nicolaim4275 C'mon, people, we science-fans and learn-enthusiasts need to
stop being lazy and do recommend each other some stuff.
Gimme recommendations! And have some!: Veritasium, Neil Red, Its ok to be smart,
HBomberguy, Tom Scott, Kozmo.
@@nicolaim4275 Thx.
I recommend Sci Man Dan, Hbomberguy, Tier Zoo, and Genetically Modified Sceptic.
And just in general many with the word Atheist in the Name, just because.
@@nenmaster5218 Steve Mould, Stand-Up Maths (Matt Parker), Physics girl, It's Okay to be Smart, Smarter Every Day, VSauce, Numberphile (and the rest of the philes), The Royal Institution, 3Blue1Brown, Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell (the best one), Vihart... I am sure I am forgetting some.
@@nenmaster5218 But many channels with atheist or rationalist in name are transphobic AF.
Also to add to the issues with this thing, cranes have a whole lot of big and small parts constanly under stress, which means lots of wear. I work at a crane rental/maintenance hub and not a single week goes by where atleast one crane of ours has something wrong with it and needs some someone to go fix it asap so construction work can continue. They will need to build a house on top of this thing and have the mechanic live in it or something, in order to keep it running efficiently
That's the first thing that came to mind. That's a whole lot of moving parts under stress.
Lol. I love the concept of just building a maintenance house on top of stuff. We can build IT houses on top of data centers, apartments on top of hospitals, etc. Lol 😆
Last week I binged on a lot for Crane Fail vids, so the moment I saw the cranes and what they were meant to do, I knew this wasn't a good idea.
@@bp968 It's like the new light house keepers!
You guys say that like it's a bug, it's a feature. Getting people to rely on a failure prone system produces lots of $$$.
Every engineer and physicist has those moments of “Wait this seems obvious. Why wouldn’t it work” and they usually assume they’re missing something and go and research. These people had that thought and immediately went to Adobe
That difference is what takes an engineer or physicist and makes him an "inventor". Never trust someone who calls themselves an inventor :)
I literally have these thoughts all the time when I learn new stuff, but then come to a conclusion that it's been years since this tech has been around, there's probably a reason no one's done it... and I'm right all the time...
@@Mnnvint I'm an inventor, and yes you absolutely shouldn't trust me for good reasons. I come up all the time with cool/smart/neat designs and concepts, but for some mysterious reasons they never end up becoming anything meaningful and/or useful and/or anything even remotely near practical. I am currently studying mechanical engineering in a university though, so start preparing your bomb shelter :D
@Arnav Kmr Same. And the ones which do actually work, later on we realise it already exists..so annoying
Should always be the first question you ask. Why isn't this being done already? Sometimes the answer is a simple 'because we couldn't before now' and the idea may actually merit further investigation. Most of the time, it's because the idea is dumb or unfeasible due to details the visionaries overlooked, or even worse, it turns out that it is, in fact, already being done and these guys just tried to sell you old news as a revolutionary new development.
I feel like the one thing this channel has taught me is that whenever a techbro tries to come up with a "futuristic" solution to a problem, it's almost always a worse version of something that already exists.
I mean EVs aren't even new either, they've 'existed' as long as internal combustion engine based cars have! In fact in those super early days EVs WERE BETTER than their gas burning contemporaries!
Most of the time, it's a train. At least this was a refreshingly stupid idea.
That's because everyone's trying to reinvent the wheel when they should be examining the wheel and seeing if they can improve it before jumping the gun and trying to make some new flashy better thing.
@@friendlycanadian3150 Welcome to capitalism, where it's not about inventing something new, just creating something that sells.
@@enginecrafter7718 iterative innovation. There are two types of innovation, iterative and creative. Iterative is safe, but slow progress overall, and creative, where the whole industry jumps to a new technology. Both are fine. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time.
I'm a software developer, and "software will handle it" is ridculous. I once spent a week making time zones work properly on a website, and my boss congratulated me for the quick solution.
Can confirm. Having software be in charge of lifting and descending very heavy concrete blocks even in ideal situations would be a very bad idea simply because of the chance of error over multiple systems is high.
@@TheBlueZombie software dev here- had a similar time zone issue that needed solving.. took me several days because of the limited functionality offered by the tech stack housing the application.
@@TheBlueZombie In that particular case, I had to modify an existing library we were using, that had pretty terrible documentation, and honestly, was not meant to do the things we wanted to do with it. (imagine a gantt chart which can automatically convert between time zones, and use dst, this was not a functionality in the original library, we had to hack a lot of the rendering to make it work)
@@TheBlueZombie typical SysAdmin understand only their own field, swears a lot.
Timezones are somewhat complicated as you often have different technologies (FE, BE, DB) in different locations having to manage times. So eg. when you say: "Give me all my meetings for First of February" it actually can mean different selection depending on where you are so you gotta send and store utc values but work with local time on FE.
When you think you've solved it you realise background workers do not have a local time and often we cut dates in just yyyy-mm-dd which if in different timezones might not always mean the same thing.
See? Not difficult but complicated
True but web software is not the kind of software that fixes these problems. Although I agree that the concept is stupid, control engineering is what would 'fix' this. The software is then just an implementation of the control strategy. You saying you are a web software developer does not confirm that this is impossible
The best part of Adam’s videos is when he “fixes” people’s stupid inventions and just ends up with something that exists
usually trains
Except that solutions like the one in the video are designed to deal with the fact that pumped storage hydropower needs a bunch of very specific parameters met to work and massive amounts of modification to the environment.
The concept is sound but implementation is not always so smooth and water evaporates, so wherever it is needs access to new water and we are in a drought.
One solution is to use Salt Water since we can't drink it anyways and there is a lot of coast line. Salt water causes lots of corrosion and makes the whole project more expensive to maintain.
The solution he talks about having an enclosed system for pumped hydro would at least reduce the amount of water loss dramatically and thus use less water. Making more locations viable and having less impact on the environment in the area its implemented in.
@@tikityler1386 ' a bunch of very specific parameters met to work' This mainly boils down to 'a hill'. Long term, the cost of using bulldozers to pile local dirt into a hill for this is ridiculously cheaper than the ongoing costs of anything else you're going to say is somehow 'better'. It should be obvious.
Always love it when the tech bros discover something that's been around for decades.
Not to say this is a bad thing though, there are tons of "forgotten" technologies that just aren't in the mainstream eye and utilizing them more can be an amazing thing.
@@ModelLights or more realistically the amount to dig a hole on the hill and to lay down concrete for the pool for the water. Along with the amount of energy lost via evaporation. Essentially there is no OP option.
As someone who works in software. "The software will handle it" is usually the marketing department or the managers engaging in magical thinking. I can't tell you how often I have been approached to implement a feature that is literally forbidden by the laws of physics that they already promised to their stakeholders with a deadline (of course before ever asking anyone with an engineering degree).
"Hey, we have a satellite sitting in geosync orbit we use for data. We need *you* to write a transfer utility so that latency falls below 50ms so we can compete with starlink. You have 4 weeks".
Ummmm...
Motherfuckin AMEN
Engineer to Management: "We can't do that. It violates the law."
Management to Engineer: "That only matters if people find out."
Engineer to Management: "No, I mean the laws of physics."
Management to Engineer: "So don't let physics find out. You have two weeks or we'll outsource your job."
"The software will handle it." "The engineers will figure it out." "The production workers will get it done."
Imagine a world where marketers, salesmen, politicians, and managerials were actually held directly accountable for their promises. No scapegoats, no excuses, no delays, no bullshit. Success or failure, reward or punishment.
"Uhm, but Hackerman did it..."
I’d never heard of this before and you managed to comprehensively introduce the concept and then thoroughly debunk it in less than 4 minutes. I’m impressed.
he did not give anywhere near a comprehensive intro to the concept of gravity storage.
So he gave you specific information chosen by himself and debunked it using information based around the info he chose
And then provide a real solution to it that happens to already exist and work.
@@um1969 well give me more information with wich i would think that the tower is a good idea.......
@Anna Myob, He is not going to give a 10 hour lecture on it, be realistic.
I can tell you now; the maintenance costs ALONE on this thing would be eye-watering. Anything involved in lifting apparatus has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles, and assuming these things are lifting and lowering blocks nonstop, which they would be, the lifetime of cables, bearings, pulleys, would be, at a guess, less than two years.
I reckon just the cost of lubricating that thing would cost around 100k a year, probably more.
Upkeep is so often kicked under the rug when they announce these big scams.
Think about wind turbines - compared to this, they hardly have any moving parts
Water based gravity batteries are better. Period.
I'd first assume stupidity before malice. Is it confirmed to be a scam? Most likely they might have started innocent and stupid, but once the money came in, they had to commit to this stupid Idea (or admit their folly which no one ever does).
Upkeep costs and decommissioning costs are like the two biggest blunders I’ve seen from disconnected suit.
First, they build things without thinking about the costs of maintaining it, which leads them to scale things down rapidly mid-project until it’s affordable at which point the project is not accomplishing the goal set out for it. This is where nearly every single moonshot invention ends up.
Second, the blunder of penny pinching executives: when they’re balancing the sheets for something, they realize they could save on all the upkeep costs by just killing the project, all while forgetting that it often costs time, money, and effort to decommission things. These costs often runs up pretty quick, and overshadow the operating costs; meaning they won’t see the benefits of decommissioning for years. 🤦♀
Indeed.
@@antonk.653 Continuing just because the money is rolling in is what makes it a Scam.
True. Construction cranes aren't thrown away once a buildingsite is finished, but if they only last as long as they are needed on one site it's not that serious. They will have to be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere anyway, so their worn out parts can easily be replaced while doing that. It seems that they want to use the same tech as a construction crane that will maybe work for a year in one place, and operate it automatically for 30 years?
Since the moment you said "let's fix it," I was waiting for the whole thing to eventually morph into pumped-storage in a humorous way. Thank you for not letting me down.
Average energy vault fan:
Average pumped hydro enjoyer:
Average flywheel enjoyer:
My original conclusion is that this type of gravity battery started due to not every geographical location having access to enough water or a place to put it.
A hole filled with water would also likely need more concrete.
Pumped storage requires a lot of water (often not near where solar works best), a valley to fill and drain (or the co2 cost of building a giant pit) and a massive concrete dam (also with CO2 costs). Not sure Adam hits the mark here on this one
@@oregonNYC but wouldn't any big structure dealing with water also count as a water storage plant, with a side function of energy reservoir? I am not affirming it would be true, but I imagine almost anything being better than solid blocks of breakable concrete, even sand being used in the place of water.
@@TheCuteZombie In places where water is plentiful and there are natural formations than make pumped water easy to store I’m sure water is the better option. Last time I checked the Sahara, Gobi, Mohave etc are great for solar, bad for water. And as I said, a giant dam and big pipes require a lot of concrete too. Might be easier to just skip the water dependency part of you already need to invest in giant amounts of concrete. This video didn’t break down the CO2 comparison between a dam/pipes vs a concrete tower, but it should have done so to make a comparison as water capture requires tons of concrete.
This feels like a first-year engineering student problem in a textbook rather than an actual proposed design
I'm thinking scribbles in a child's notebook. The concept just looks so stupid I can't even believe anybody is taking it seriously.
I did not even know someone would get such a stupid idea and that it would be advertised to a large audience! I wonder how deranged have people gotten these days
@@shrujanamsyama9940 Musk being as rich as he is while 95% of his projects are duds speaks volumes on that issue. Marketing+stupid people=lots of money.
@@csfelfoldi Actually, Musk is an agent of powerful illuminati dynasties via govt. Musk was funded by govt in a desperate attempt at replacing petroleum products as oil reserves were depleting. It had nothing to do with marketing. There was a genuine desperation to replace oil and hence desperate measures were taken. But the petty innovations is ridiculous and retarded which serve no purpose
@@shrujanamsyama9940 The US government is flushing Tesla with green money to keep CO2 quotas. However that is not his only income.
Just look how much money his idiotic hyperloop got from states like California and they are funding him even more to dig tiny sized metroways for underground Teslas that can transport 3 people at a time....
As a physicist and former nuclear engineer I really appreciated this dispelling of BS. A subscription seems to be in order.
They were claiming 90% efficiency, which is not the round trip efficiency of pump plus hydro. Im thinking the block system but with water filled cubes would be more practical. Thoughts?
@@mokiloke Why not just lift a single massive one ton block hundreds of feet high then let is slowly comedown turning a massive generator. (Not sure why hundreds of small rocks would be needed.
@@rayharvey1330 Yep, there are some ease of engineering that make small blocks easier to cast, and cables less massive. But against that you have, as you say, just go massive, and simplify the number of moving pieces. I guess theres a sweet spot in there somewhere between, but i tend to agree, their machines had way to many moving parts which would blow about in the wind.
pff did you do the math?
UNSUBSCRIBED
I gotta admit, when you first presented the block stacking my first thought "wow, that sounds interesting, but i sure hope that they wont stack them on top of each other with 0 safety measures like in minecraft."
I’d think why not use water. Use parabolic mirrors to evaporate it as many times as possible to get to the proper height during the day, then let it drain downwards to spin turbines at night. Seems it’d be a lot easier than precision stacking of large blocks. And you could even bore deep wells to increase the net height that the mass falls. Maybe a 500 ft tower, coupled with a 500’ well. Gives two things- 1st unlimited water source, and 2nd a 1000 ft drop. How the hell did he think that cement blocks was a smart idea?
Edit: oh crap- they did suggest water. Lol. I left the comment mid video.
I thought I was looking at Minecraft at first with that CGI
I have to interject.....stacking is very safe in Minecraft
Wind physics in Minecraft would not be a pleasant experience.
when i saw the video i was thinking it was minecraft
I love how most tech industry is like "so I have this idea everyone knows and has been using for tens of years but now it's "tech" so better". Remember how Peoloton bikes were valuated at 30% of the whole fitness industry despite being fancy stationary bikes?
Or Wework. But this smells more like a Theranos type of scam, you ELI5 a problem and propose a tech that you can explain the benefits of to normal people that don't understand the issue and you handwave inefficiencies and problems of feasibility as issues that will eventually be solved (maybe by software) when the current proven techs are the way they are is because they solve or otherwise don't have the issues that your "solution" has (dilution, sample size, reproducible results, etc.)
Like the solar highways BS of a few years ago. An obvious example would be like a 5 year old asking why instead of smog producing traffic congestion, we just make emissionless flying cars? We'll solve the issue of lack of pilots by developing autodrive/pilot while we're at it.
@@humbleguy1533 I just wish theyd do this for an existing tech that is ACTUALLY transformative; say, crude oil generating algae, like Sapphire Energy had bred back in 2009-2010. They were literally generating crude oil from algae and selling it to the US Navy, they just had efficiency (reduction of microscopic algal predators for increased growth) and harvesting (had to be dried and pressed for the oil) issues to resolve. But honestly they were 70% of the way there before gas prices came back down, investment dried up, and they had to sell their company to a Chinese vitamin company who decided to adopt the strain for use in producing vegetable oil instead of crude oil.
We literally had a real world OILIX on our hands and we let it go. Meanwhile people throw billions at Theranos. Sigh.
my church gym had bikes with fans replacing the wheels for fitness machines in the year 2000
That's how I feel about Tesla. Its a fantastic company with a great product but its valued at more than almost every other car company COMBINED, despite the modest profits and volume
@1998SIMOMEGA Stanford dropout made the company Theranos and proceeded to scam a bunch of investors/patients with promises of a new blood testing methodology that was completely made up. The issue wasn't that they failed to produce a new blood test method. The issue was that long after they'd determined that their new test method was wholly ineffective, they continued to raise/take money from investors, ran tests for patients using their competitor's results, and provide outlooks that contradicted internal knowledge/documents.
It's perfectly okay to fail, but it's a crime to hide it from investors.
I gritted my teeth when I heard of the idea of sticking it right next to wind turbines...
Wind turbines are very sensitive to obstacles in the flow path of the air.
There is evidence of wind parks influencing each other over distances of 70km.
So building a giant wind obstacle right next to a wind park is about the dumbest thing one could do...
Wind turbines are generally stupid, BUT most areas with sufficient wind also have extremely dominant wind directions, though they may change by season. So you could put something to the side and it would be fine.
@@toomanymarys7355 i'm not a weather scientist but i would say that having 200 km³ of concrete in a big tower would affect wind patterns anywhere in the world
@@toomanymarys7355 Are they?
Why do you think so?
hmm, so why don't we use the power generated by the wind turbine to...spin up a turbine, and when there is no wind, let that turbine wind back down...BRILLIANT, can I get a few billion dollars from investors to create flywheel storage?
I'm hoping it was just to compare size, but who knowsss
'Software' is the same as movie producers saying, 'We can fix it in post production.'
I am industrial designer, and I am ALWAYS stunned by how these ideas never seem to account for weather, wear-and-tear and maintenance time and costs. The US Army's Alaska command always has to deal with new designs that use water in their systems. When they see that, they just put the product, reagardless of size. in the Alaskan winter and watch all of the lines and containers with water freeze and burst.
I simply love how you take a "futuristic" take and just simplify and adjust it until it just becomes something that we are already well familiar with
and the thing we already have works more efficient, at a better price and is more sustainable
not just adjust, improve
@@michaeltamke8542 The challenge is to adapt the pumped storage idea to places that don't have suitable topograhy for it.
Imo he just enjoys shitting on new ideas. All innovations look crazy at first. And not every new technology has to be a general solution to all the worlds problems. I don’t see why this wouldn‘t be potential solution in specific situations.
@@lukasmiller8531 which situations tho
Also, like flywheel energy storage, the problem is that one can't practically extract all the energy in the system: the energy in the bottom half of the pile is very low, and cannot be economically extracted. In reality, it would be better to start the pile on a hill of rock. Like, erm, pumped storage.
@Error 909 Not Found no it doesn't, with pump storage you have the hill so a height difference which always gives you a pressure difference, so even if your higher reservoir is not full you always have a pressure difference, here the first floor you have like 1m height difference so 1m worth of potential energy, wow
@sourand jaded In terms of synchronisation, couldn't you just achieve that with clever gearing?
@Error 909 Not Found that's not how this works
@sourand jaded you're missing the point of flywheels. All storage methods that are actually being used right now have some niche to fill and for flywheels that id very very quick responses to energy demand. They're clearly not meant for full grid storage and anyone who says they are is an idiot. Their niche is to deliver energy quickly during unexpected spikes in consumption or absorb energy during unexpected spikes in production.
The issue isn't so much with reclaiming that energy, as there isn't too much in there, compared to the total energy this station could handle over its lifetime. The issue is that half of thr blocks are completely useless, as once half of them are "lowered", there is no potential energy difference between the top rows of both stacks. So essentially, half of the blocks are just used as a spacer.
Id love to see what happens when one of those tiny ass feet that are meant to hold these huge concrete blocks breaks off and causes the whole thing to collapse like a Jenga tower.
I was thinking that. The mechanism for holding those blocks doesn't inspire confidence. I wouldn't stand near it.
The software will handle that eventuality
@@Mt.Berry-o7 lmfaooo
Have a look at container cranes.
@@jackdeniston59 Yes but container cranes do it with metal shipping containers, whereas with the video it shows cement blocks with only the edges being secured. The edges of cement crumbles over time.
I was half expecting you to turn the energy vault into a train. I am disappointed and relieved.
It’s always funny to see ideas that sound smart at first but end up just being a devolution of an already existing idea
I wonder if trading a gazillion small blocks for just one big massive lead weight or some other heavy material would be better. Would last longer than stone and weigh more. One big block instead of many, you hoist it up when power is cheap and release it to generate power during the peak times to pay for the cost paid to hoist it earlier hopefully with some profit. Then you have just one big block to lift so there isn't this expensive dancing orchestra of blocks. Just one big one. Goes up and down like once per day. A really big block so tons of energy is sucked down but released later. If you make just one big block I wonder if the pollution it creates to make Is less than if you made many blocks. Could even just be a big bucket built to last long term filled up with dirt even tbh. One big giant bucket would be a better idea because you could fill it up with different things. Could fill it up with some ocean water. A huge bucket. Put it in a rainy area. Idk man. Put springs under it so it reverses direction quicker when it hits the bottom. Do stuff to make if go up and down more effectively
@@TheAnnoyingBoss the fundamental problem will using a big block is the total energy stored is limited by 1 super basic formula:
PE = mgh
Potential energy (joules) = mass (kg) × 9.8m/s^2 × height (m)
If you swap h to be kilometers then it measures kilojoules, and electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours which is 1 kilojoule per second for an entire hour aka 3600kJ of energy, the size of anything being moved must be insanely massive to even remotely be capable of storing more energy than just making a warehouse filled with chemical batteries. (Like you better be lifting a mountain)
Pumped hydro works because water is amorphous so we can easily pump it from 1 reservoir the size of a lake to another reservoir the size of a lake without needing the worlds strongest elevator.
Although something even simpler, use conventional hydro as your battery. It would take some restructuring of the operations and ownership of the grid but basically put a crap ton of solar panels net to the hoover dam and consider it 1 power plant, the solar works during the day and the dam stores water (letting enough flow to maintain the river's ecological health) then at night the sun stops shining and the dam turns on and provides the same generational capacity as the solar did. (Even better, they don't need to be next to eachother, just turn on/off hydro as needed to treat it like a battery, although some faster response batteries would be recommended, and the total hydro capacity of the world is finite)
Silicon Valley reinvented the bus again.
it just looks really stupid . they just waste energy moving blocks around and the entire thing looks like it would need regular heavy maintenence really often because all the parts would drop in durability all the time
That was just a fancy and extra stuff to transfer energy into potential.
Adam casually improving on a "revolutionary new invention" only to turn it into an old pre-existing technology that already works much better will never cease to be hilarious.
Can you explain how this system would work in the southwest usa where there is not enough water?
@@aaronburns9365 The same water is reused over and over so it's not really much of a problem. All you are doing is pumping water up when energy costs are cheap and releasing it to drive a turbine when immediate energy is needed. Edit : yes this is at a net loss but it's not as lossy overall as the ridiculous crane and blocks idea and both are only used to cover unexpected high demand. It's a battery.
@@englishsteve1465 Large scale storage systems are going to experience a lot of loss from evaporation and soil seepage. It is not viable in arid climates. If it was viable then you would see more hydro power being used in the southwest. As it is there is very little b/c there is vary little water.
@@englishsteve1465 lol 😂 yer having more then one form of gravity storage is so dumb.
Its not like there is more then one type of battery that would be stupid.
@@markrichardson2508 There are many forms of energy storage for systems like Solar and Wind power.
Weight, pulled up and down. Spinning a big heavy wheel. Pumping water up stream. Regular lithium batteries. Capacitors for quick response. Pressured air pumped down to earth.... Oh Last time I looked up I came up with 12 or so different storages and Pumping water, batteries and pressured air were probably the top 3 in that order.
CONSIDERING there are mulitple different solution as you say, why would you bring old 80s battery that is less efficient and just over all worse than many others now days?
The idea that is shown as "new" was old tehcnology back in 2013 so I they are not designing anything new. The biggest difference is that you can attach new weigh to the system which is interesting. I explored one where you have weights that you can't remove like in the Anime they made. I think doing it either way is fine one just requires more stuff. You easily have system that can drive one or more weights are once and when you lower them they are active one by one and when they reach the bottom they activate next system and if you need more power you drop two or more weights at once but lose the stored energy faster.
I mean, I have no clue how these systems work :d I'm just random person claiming to be Electrical Engineer...
As someone who works in the energy industry, huge round of applause. There's a goldrush in energy storage right now, and there are so many initiatives like this, where a tiny amount of energy is stored for a huge MWh price. This one is especially terrible though...
As you are someone with experience in the energy sector, which energy storage type and generator (e.g. flywheel + wind turbine) would you recommend to a household and which would you recommend to a government.
Is that one really that bad? I thought the price was... high, but not stupid high and the main problem was to let the thing run for years.
Have you heard of the ETES approach from Siemens Gamesa? What are your thoughts on it?
@@steemlenn8797 It's Occam's razor, this is a extremely complicated system, which generates at an extremely high €/MWH. It's unappealing for investors, grid operators and as pointed out, store a tiny amount of energy for what it is. The UK for example is currently consuming 25 GWh/h per at night and up to 45 GWh/h at peak. 4-8 MWh/h for 8-16 hours is a flea on an elephant. I'd say schemes like this are more about increasing a company's profile more than anything else.
Great that it looks like something out of Fallout though
@@Vulcano7965 I'm curious about it, I haven't seen any output efficiency charts for it, but the fact they have test units in operation alone is a good sign. I'm not sure about the claim that it's scalable, but that could just be me being skeptical, if anything it's a good use of old brownfield thermal sites.
We've had pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway for years, we usually buy cheap wind power at night times from Denmark to pump water back up.
The rabbit hole goes deep on this one. Take a look at their investor presentation document.
truly, a rabbithole it is!
It looks like an elaborate scam targetting investors..
@@mattlegge8538 it's like cargolifter for electricians
DAVE!
My guess is that upkeep alone would ground this idea.
With a continuous running system like this, the Steel cables will eat through a wheel(pulley) within a few cycles. This device would be more offline than online and only because of service needed every few cycles.
I have a genius idea on how to make your system even more energy efficient. You can use solar energy to boil water from the lower reservoir, and then you can recondense it in the upper reservoir so that it doesn't need to be pumped. Then when you need additional energy, you can allow the water from the upper reservoir to spin the turbine and dump into the lower reservoir. I call this variation the DumbAss Modification... Or DAM for short.
also why not hook up the boiled water into another steam turbine? rofl
ok ok, i get what you going for, but for the record boiling water is less energy efficient than pumping it.
If only there was a natural way to boil the water... like by using all the energy volcanoes waste.
@@khhnator The Sun : allow me to introduce myself
I know how to improve on this idea. Use some minerals that naturally decay and produce heat to create the steam to turn the turbine, and let it recondense in a closed loop that creates constant power.
I love how I live in Tasmania, a state of Australia that produces more hydroelectric and therefore carbon zero energy per capita every year than any other state, meaning we were closer to 100% clean energy than any other state. But in 2017 the Turnbull government created the NEG, which in short forced our state-owned electricity provider Hydro Tasmania to buy power from privately-owned mainland power companies. These are the same power companies that go all "BROOO TECH BROoo" on us whilst running on mostly coal power. Coal power they're too lazy and greedy to divest themselves of, so I'm forced to use their coal while they use our hydro and wind and solar.
So now, I'm forced to buy coal power from a monopoly as I can't afford solar panels for my own home. And as Hydro Tasmania privatisation is on the cards from the state Gutwein government, my power bills are probably going to soar. So now, thanks to tech bros demanding their "fair share" from the federal government and leeching off the taxpayer at great expense, I live in a state that uses 90% carbon zero energy running on coal power for several times the cost. Thanks tech bros
But uh bro, jus think about it bro. With all that energy bro we could charge one million (posts dr evil meme cry laugh emoji) teslas brooo. And they could uuuh race with their sick dope epic autopilot bro yooo and the winner turns into a pickle brooo
Yeah I remember visiting Strath Gordon Dam, such amazing engineering and makes us entirely energy independent, even ignoring how much power we practically give away to Nyrstar for zinc refining (I can't remember the exact percentage off the top of my head, but they consume a significant proportion of it)
I just want a progressive government back. We have rubbish public transit, terrible housing, and now electric scooters making Hobart even harder to walk through. Woo
Oh and don't even get me started on Telatra and the NBN
YEAH Australia has had a TERRIBLE government for the last - what, 10 years is it??
Wait a second. What difference does it make whether you consume energy made out of coal abroad, and someone abroad consumes energy made from hydro that your state makes in your stead? It's all the same amount of energy in total, and all the same amount of hydro energy is being generated, and all the same amount of coal is getting burned? Or what am i reading wrong?
But as to privatising publicly owned energy companies: NO PLEASE NO, OK?
Another big benefit of pumped storage hydroelectricity over the "Energy Vault" is that it can be started during a blackout, while most other powerplants need some power to start up. You only need to open a valve after all. I doubt the Energy Vault would be capable of that, as the cranes need power to just get the blocks off the tower.
That Power isn't more than what you need to "only open a Valve". Hydro Plants have Diesel Generators for that Puropse, and it wouldn't be different with the Energy Vault. It's still a rubbish Concept tho
@@Genius_at_Work it is different in that you only need to open the valve once... whereas every block wastes energy getting moved off the stack. And at least theoretically you could make most hydro plants operable with human power only it would just mean the valve opens fairly slow (think treadwheel power etc)
@@Wingnut353 I have a bit Experience in your last Point. The Force required to open Valves gets ridiculous as their Size increases. I occasionally have to operate a manual Butterfly Valve roughly 70 cm in Diameter, and opening or closing it takes three Men at least 15 Minutes. And that's just the Cooling Water of a fairly small Container Ship.
Plus there's a lot more to Hydro Power than just opening a Valve. Like in almost all Power Plants, the Generators must run at an exact Speed to maintain AC Frequency. This requires large and heavy Guide Vanes in the Turbines, to adjust for different Water Flow Rates and different Electrical Loads. Run of the River Hydroelectricity also needs a lot of Hydraulics for the Weir to regulate the Water Level in the River, and thus have 500+ kW Diesel Generators.
Btw. said manual Valve must be closed to clean Sea Cooling Water Filters, and because that shouldn't happen very often (but may in Areas with a lot of Plastic Pollution, e.g. India), a hydraulic or electric Valve isn't worth the Money. The Valve between the Cooling Water Intake and the Filter is hydraulic, as quickly closing it is very Safety relevant. The manual Valve is between the Filter and the Suction Pipe of the Sea Water Pumps.
This guy makes hydro sound so much easier than it is. Just open a valve he says hahaha
@@Genius_at_Work additionally, basically all big generators need electricity to function because we don't use inconsistent permanent magnets for the rotors but have DC "excitation currents" for electromagnets wrapped around the rotor to provide much greater control over the magnetic field. Obviously when the grid is on everything is self powering, but from a blackstart you need a diesel generator with a permanent magnet rotor to just get the thing turned on, or you need someone else to energize the transmission lines to give you a jump start.
And you are right that "just opening a valve" is no joke. And while in theory a tiny hydro generator could be designed where 1 person could open a single valve to serve as a backup, the engineering expense is dumb compared to just using a normal generator or battery backup.
The second I hear "this idea will save the world/stop climate change" my skeptic side immediately kicks in. Big promises *usually means* big oversights
Except no one who designed the actual machine is saying that... this machine was for rural communities without access to any kind of power plant nor large amounts of water for water storage. Some randos might have claimed save the world but that was NEVER the intention or claim of this tech. Even the largest of models is only meant to provide power for a few thousand homes.
If you hear something is going to "stop the climate change", it is automatically a lie. Climate has changed throughout the lifetime of earth, so I don't think human can stop that natural phenomenon very easily.
@@Ziegeri No its not easy to stop but its definitely not natural. Decades of dumping a fuckload of carbon into the air through things like burning fossil fuels. Stopping climate change is 100% possible but it'll be hard work and dedicated infrastructure. Subsidies like what has been provided to oil and meat industries but for renewables instead. No ONE tech is going to do it but a bunch of them working where they are best suited will.
@@TheWeaponshold But then how did the climate change multiple times before even humans existed? You know ice ages and such, I would call such an event a climate change.
@@Ziegeri Yes glacial and interglacial periods. Those took place over MUCH larger time scales and much slower and the CO2 levels had never risen above about 300 parts per million and now its over 400 parts per million. Does not sounds like a lot and its still perfectly breathable but far less than that amount of change in CO2 has put our planet through those cycles before and we went WAY beyond. And we are responsible for bringing it back down or we can just kiss our ass goodbye as the planet purges us like a disease.
Also can we talk about how just rearanging them in a bigger circle arround the tower SEVERLY limits the capacity of the battery? As soon as the heights equilize your've got no more energy to take from it. Worst case scenario you can only really ever use half of the height.
"Half the height"?
No, not really...
If this were practical (which it isn't) you've missed the realisation that an "outer circle" of blocks could have twice the diameter... C = pi * D. Double the diameter and you can move 66% of the full height of blocks to 33% as the 'discharged' height (ie: more than 50%). Go for a 3rd ring and all of the blocks could be lowered to 16% of the full height...
It's just theoretical... The idea as presented is rubbish, but the CGI version has quite a larger capacity than only 50%... 🙂
@@rustycherkas8229 you also have to worry about decreased efficiency as you stack the outer ring higher the difference in height between the inner and outer blocks goes down so you get less energy per block moved
@@kingofgar101
Right you are!
One might expect that (if this were at all realistic) the selection of which-blocks-are-moved-where would be 'choreographed' to somehow optimise the energy recovery to match expectations... It's an interesting academic exercise, and it's amazing that the company's marketing wastes time claiming blocks would be painted thereby becoming a pixels in a "towering artwork"... Hope you like abstract!! 🙂
When my daughter was 3, her Christmas present was a bag full of wooden blocks... On Christmas night I tried stacking a tower using those blocks... It's amazing how an invisible imperfections in lower layers were 'amplified' up the columns making the 8th or 9th layer unstable... a stack of 60 or 80 is only possible in one's imagination, or in "an artist's rendering for marketing purposes"...
Happy New Year! 🙂
@@rustycherkas8229 Theoretically you can lock the blocks to the side blocks as well to offset it but that is only a small problem with the system.
@@catprog
Theoretically, hexagonal blocks could be arrayed in a honeycomb pattern that would avoid dealing with the differences between rectangles and circles...
Theoretically, I should be eating my dinner right now... 🙂
I visited the Grand Coulee damn when I was a kid and the tour guide explained how the pump water up into canals above the damn overnight and then let it back down to generate electricity during the day. And I thought, oh, that's smart! I mean, what could be better than that? Water is super easy to move and it doesn't break.
And then a few years ago my friend's boss was talking about how much wind power sucks because we need some way to store power for peak usage times. And like, what are we gonna do? Build a bunch of batteries?
So then I told him about the hydroelectric method for storing energy and it totally blew his mind. It's surprising how few people know about this and also explains why people can fall for a ridiculously stupid idea like block stacking.
Even pumped hydro can't save VRE. Still too expensive and geographically limited. Storage requirements are so enormous, that even such a beautiful tech like pumped hydro can't help it.
"what are we gonna do? Build a bunch of batteries?" yeah, that's exactly what we should do
@@texajp1946 well, China has both money and unexplored geographical potential. Not everyone has it. And it's still not clear, how clean their mix for Olympics would be.
@@ImaskarDono tex is a bot
@@texajp1946 We've had them since 50 years ago. The Bath County pumped Storage station services the east coast grid.
And energy storage is not green energy, its actually an energy consumer from the loss you get with storage. The energy they produce for the Beijing Olympics are still going mostly going to come from China's coal plants. That they store it in a battery first doesn't make it green. The green energy they're refering to is because its also a hydro power plant (not just battery). You know, like the Hoover Dam or Aswan Dam.
I actually saw the prototype in Ticino Switzerland a couple of years ago. Its just opposite the railway station in Arbedo. It was an utterly bizarre looking thing. Took some photos and found out what is was... Interestingly enough, my immediate thought was about the CO2 emissions of creating the concrete blocks. I studied civil engineering at uni and remember one amazing statistic from the materials lab... To manufacture 1kg of cement (the bonding material of concrete) creates 25kg of CO2! I cycled past it again in the spring this year (2022) and it was being dismantled. As shown in the video, an alternative to concrete is rammed earth, this is a versatile building material that's been around for millennia. Using a less impactful bonding agent (say lime) this could be a viable alternative.
One thought I had was that if you're doing it in a pit to get out of the wind, save a whole bunch of the dirt you remove & use that for the weight of the blocks, like instead of solid concrete, make them like giant buckets filled with that dirt.
But yeah, water being self-leveling & the tech already exists are 2 very large plusses, & I'm sure there's a lot more energy loss to all those cables & the horizontal block movement than there would be with appropriately sized pipes.
The big problem with any kind of gravity-based energy storage system is that gravity is just not that strong a force. You need vast masses (which is what hydro starts to get you) or vast heights for the storage to become significant enough to matter. That's why this tower can only handle the approximate energy output from one wind turbine.
I've seen other schemes with masses going up a hill on rails and such. If you do the math they just don't have that much capacity. I saw one that involved lifting whole blocks of land from underneath by pumping in some kind of fluid. Still seems overcomplicated but with that one, at least the masses were getting into an impressive range.
@@MattMcIrvin with a rail based system, I'm pretty sure you'd lose a lot more energy to friction & moving the engine/carriage around, especially since the grade is limited so there's a lot more horizontal motion that doesn't store energy, it costs both ways.
@@LightbringerDesigns With a rail based system you don't move the carriage around, it's fixed and the carriage is pulled by cables. You can get some pretty steep inclines with funiculars (specially without passengers), and friction losses are minimal.
@@LightbringerDesigns How about just using stone blocks like Egyptians and Mayans. Why this much emphasis on something complex as concrete?
Stone blocks have minimal maintanance and nearly zero wear and tear. And can last for centuries.
Adam: "I'm no Engineer..."
Me, who is an Engineer: *Immediately after they show the grabbing mechanism* "It doesn't work"
Software engineer and even I see those things snap off in spectacular ways
@@OmegaGamer04 Marketing department: We'll call it a kinetic impact delivery system.
im not engineer but as a tradesperson who makes prototype (and often retarded engineering) a reality I can say for a fact we could figure out how to build a 4 point block grabber work for 30 years of continuous use... would it look exactly like it is depicted? probably not.
me who is still in school, and not even studying: I don't give a shit that this is gonna work
@@mcripchip That's not the issue though. You're right the problem is solvable; we already have proof in gantry cranes, which are capable of efficiently moving large heavy blocks for decades. The problem is that the specific design they chose to show here for whatever reason is unnecessarily novel and obviously flawed.
It's like, imagine presenting a design, and when it comes to the smallest, most easily solvable detail, rather than glossing over it you zoom in on a fancy graphic that reads "dunno, we'll figure this part out." That doesn't really inspire confidence.
I started cackling at the end, you really showed how needlessly overcomplicated the crane idea was just to fit the CEO's "futuristic design"
Except not. Pumped hydro works mountainous regions or regions with relatively wet climates. Doesn't work in the desert.
But that's how you can get a bunch of investors and jack up your stock price. ;D Which they have already by over 100% (NRGV) lol
@@ChrisG1392 The answer is in the video btw: dig.
@@ChrisG1392 35 MWh is enough for an industrial town of 4.000 people for a day of completely uninhibited operations during a total failure of energy production. You simply don't have that in the middle of a desert, neither you need that kind of a backup; a battery of that capacity could easily serve a town several times as large, which is even rarer in a desert. Also let's do some math: this thing is about 90m high (as much as a 3 MW wind turbine), and the cranes seem to be about 50m across. Pumped water energy storage is about 80% efficient, which adds up neatly: a water tower of the same size as this contraption, with a pool next to it, can store & output almost exactly 35 MWh of energy, while requiring significantly less maintenance and complexity. The amount of water contained in such battery is much less than the people using it spend over a couple months, and it can be any kind of water, including sea water or waste water from the people using such battery.
pumped hydro doesn't work as many places as the crane does. But I agree, build them underground and with a gantry crane. pumps and turbines fail same as concrete blocks, and more often. Also, when dealing with water you corrosion issues, filtration issues, etc. The concrete blocks will last a LONG time and are EASILY replaced.
Guess what, EV car batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines also used fossil fuel energy to make as well. This is a bullshit argument. Have to start somewhere. Never mind the fact that concrete is far more recyclable than lithium batteries.
No way in hell are those little tabs on the “grabbing” mechanism gonna hold the weight of those concrete blocks. 3:07
material science will handle it
ever heard of the word "concept"
"Software will handle it" 😁
dude. no way in hell you know better than a team of engineers working for a multi million dollar project.
@@s3bastiaan SoFTwaRE WiLl haNdLE iT
Now I can imagine that Adam would be that one professor in an engineering college who can give failing marks to some students who do Thesis Defense on solutions that already worked in the field.
Keep in mind that he doesnt say that wont work, he says its ridicolously over complicated for what it is
@@stevengunter4990 infact it would work, the issue is that it is unpractical and expensive for what it aims to acomplish
@@auspiciouscheetah thats exactly what i said.
" `Software will handle it` is the tech bro equivalent of `I have faith in Jesus`. "
As a software engineer, thank you. The amount of faith technocrats put in software, somehow escaping that fact that it's written by humans (inb4 "but what about AI?"), is scary.
machine learning on the blockchain will solve this problem
True, but saying „there is wind so it wont work“ is equally dumb. With that attitude no engineering problem would ever be solved. No one says a skyscraper or bridge or antenna wont work „because there is wind“
@@lukasmiller8531 Oh. I CAN be solved. Problem is that is not not doable. The problem is that after taking that into consideration is no longer feasible.
It reminded me of the classic production quote "we'll fix it in post" much to any editors dismay haha.
yep as another software engineer, people think our work is magic. In reality it's duct tape. The people who build real software work at NASA and defense contractors, and they follow a discipline that 99% of software engineers haven't even heard of, let alone actively use: systems engineering.
also, AI is not intelligent. GPT-3 is not on the way to human-level intelligence, not even close - it's just a party trick. Just had to get that off my chest.
I like how instead of solving actual problems they "solve" already solved problems
Edit: yes i know that this problem isn't actually solved so please shut up about it
Well you could say that hydroelectric cant be put everywhere.... Which this (really bad) concept tries to solve...
@@KeVIn-pm7pu I'm pretty sure that hydroelectric isn't the only good eay of storing energy
step 1. find a problem with a simple solution.
step 2. come up with future-tech epic bacon 420 tech bro solution.
step 3. use CGI to market your "revolutionary idea" to idiots, gullible journalists, etc.
step 4. profit.
step 5. move to a less dystopian, European country with clean air, lower noise pollution, sensible laws, etc.
step 6. sigma male grindset achieved.
but in cool sounding non-efficient futuristic way
@@Commielyn hydro is generally the only grid scale energy storage system we have that im aware of. I could be wrong though.
As an environmental engineer I want to thank you.. a lot.. seriously. "Hey, let's stack a lot of concrete above ground."-"Wow, that's so smart! In that way we could store half the energy a hectare of forest would store on twice the area and while building it emit only twice the CO2 the same forest would store in 4100 years!"-"Yeah, nice!"-"Also it looks a lot better than the forest of course. Because who would like to live in lush green landscapes rather than a grey concrete desert." 🙈
As an environmental engineer, can you suggest another solution, which wouldn't involve destroying several thousand square kilometers for a water reservoir.
@@goodday3108 how many water reservoirs are “several thousand square kilometers” in the area they take up?
@@manbabymonke am I your personal calculator?
@@goodday3108 you’re asking for a solution to a problem from someone but won’t even have the dignity to provide proof of your problem existing?
Curious, any ideas on how to improve construction projects with concrete?
This contraption with the weights does not make sense. I have a physics and electrical engineering background. I don't even want to take the time to get in to this thing, but I can say it is not efficient.
The level of precision required as shown in their animation of lifting a single block is absolutely crazy. It assumes that all blocks will be both manufactured and placed correctly every time. It also assumes that the cables won't wobble in the slightest. Also the design shown looks extremely weak. It's a half-pipe with a half circle rotating completely out from under the half circle, with no support other than potentially a shaft near the edge of it, while it's carrying a load on the other edge. That design would break on the first occasion.
@@Grauenwolf Having 1 mounting point would make alignment when placing the blocks even more difficult as it would be more likely to twist and swing. Although it could definitely be built more sturdily and hooking in the first place could be made easier by tapering the entry point.
Hey bro, you ever played with legos? Yeah? You remember those little pin things that slot into the bottom of the other blocks, making it so your lego creation always stays straight up and alligned?
Wow, did you know they already do this with concrete blocks? Meaning that it doesnt require precision at all? You just need to put it somewhere inside the range of 30 cm to connect it and then just drop it the last bit. You know what is much more precise than that? Container cranes! Which can drop a container within a centimeter or so even during heavy wind, with much less dense containers which swing much more than solid concrete or metal blocks.
@@ratelslangen What's up with the shitty attitude? If you had read my previous comment, you would have realized that I already know it's a possibility to make tapered holes for indexing. No it's not like legos, no we can't make that exact kind of system with concrete due to the extremely tight tolerances needed and concrete's hardness. The cranes shown also don't have nearly the same level of stability as those meant for containers, which by the way are a lot heavier than concrete blocks. That means that they're moved much less by wind, and it helps that we aren't lifting them up that high either. Listen, I'm not interested in fixing their design for them, someone already did that, and they used water as weights. I'm just pointing out how bad the current design is.
Uh. No. Those are not an issue. Ever seen a construction crane? They get within an few centimeters of the mark on the ground high winds or no, and they have less toe in (built in precision) on the lowering cables.
This design is frankly just a pretty run of the mill gravity battery, one that happens to utilize a computer to store more energy in a smaller footprint, but run of the mill no less.
All the fluff in the marking video is just to distract you from the fact that they have been used since before the first electric plant was built. Heck, im pretty sure carpenters where using gravity batteries like this to turn wood in the dark ages.
And to distract investors from realizing they are extremely durable lasting generations not 30 years.
That lack of built in obsolescence is really really bad for investing.
@@humanistwriting5477 Really, the only useful gravity battery has been those clocks with hanging weights, and they only last a week. Terrible idea for lathes, they were treadle powered (like sewing machines) in the olden, called pole lathes.
There is a crane that uses depleted mines for such a thing. And uses one massive dead wait and allows it to lower when energy is needed. Produces the same power with less movement
Weight* but yes, I was looking for this comment.
one enormous dry oil well with a giant solid lead mass seems like it would be much more energy-efficient than a bunch of blocks or even pumped storage, but at some point pumped storage may be more scalable depending on the availability of abandoned wells. At least it's still an option for locations where pumped storage is unfeasible due to bad topography and/or water scarcity.
@@ethanpayne4116
Both abandoned wells and hills for pumped storage are location dependent and finite in size and number. I personally think some kind of flywheel system is going to be a typical answer. That, or a some new breakthrough in graphene batteries or similar high density storage.
@@kindlin flywheels sound nice in theory and maybe they'll be great for high-tech facilities, but in my mind the precision needed to protect against sensitivity and risk of catastrophic failure seem way greater for flywheels than the costs of just drilling a well with existing equipment for most moderately remote sites. Maybe flywheels are more robust than that though, but intuitively it doesn't seem extreme to favor the method with less kinetic energy. I guess if we prefab the flywheels and then just install them wherever then maybe that will end up being more efficient, but idk how far we are from that being a practical reality.
@@kindlin I guess flywheels have the potential of much greater capacity, but to take advantage of that capacity we have to manufacture an extremely robust/efficient flywheel whereas a well is literally just a dumb hole in the ground.
Okay, so pumped-storage hydro actually does everything this system promises to do - awesome!
The obvious problem is that natural sites suitable for pumped-storage hydro are super rare.
So the questions are, how can you artificially create such a system at minimal cost and environmental impact, and could that possibly be cheap enough to be economically viable?
Making an earthen resovoir and an artificial lake on a flat plane has still gotta be cheaper then the literal hundreds/thousands of cranes you would need for this thing to compete though.
the the problem is "natural sites suitable for pumped-storage hydro"
solve that instead this nonsense.
instead "natural" why not "artificial"?
we have brain to think not to dream only.
Build a reservoir on the top of a cliff close to the sea and pump salt water. You can even use the pressure to desalinize part of it.
Old abandoned mineshafts make a good (and deep) empty cavity underground. With the "high" water reservoir on the surface. This concept is called: Underground Pumped Hydro Storage (UPHS).
Drop a concrete slab in front of a river
1:38 "winds are strong ...stack blocks with high precision.... I see." The dry sardonic tone at the end is hilarious! :)
As an amateur, I am puzzled by the method of picking up the blocks.
Surely a handle on the top of each block would be the best solution.
It could even serve as a locking mechanism for the blocks stacked on top of it.
@Gernot Schrader
“Gell”??
It's solved by "software"!! lol
You've clearly put more thought into this. That's how concrete blocks are made for temporary retaining walls, with a ridge on the top that fits into a notch on the bottom of the next block, and a steel bar for a lifting point.
@@joey_bonzo SIXTEEN TIMES THE DETAIL
@@Traitorman..Proverbs26.11 gell is colloquial for ",doesn't it?" and ",isn't it?,
"software will handle it" is just the engineering equivalent of "we'll just fix it in post" famous among (incompetent) photographers and filmmakers.
3 days before exam "i'll study later" just to fail the test because you barely looked through your lesson 5 mins before getting fucked is more relateable to most youtube users i think :p
@@mhplayer something I have come to notice is that there is no such thing as fixing shitty input data. Shit in, shit out.
Code is an excellent problem maker itself. So you are just making a problem lasagna.
@@minerscale "we'll just filter out the bad data"
...
"what happened to all our data??"
To be fair. I fix a lot of photos in the post. But I also know what I am doing.
The sheer audacity of this CEO claiming that he has solved the world's biggest problem of electricity.
It's more that he's thought of an idea, and just won't let it go despite how many problems it encounters.
That's not at all what he's saying.
The proper translation goes like this....
"I have come up with a stupid idea that I can use to convince politicians to send me piles of other people's money, then after paying them kick-backs I can declare the business bankrupt and move on to my next scam."
The absurde thing is, that that guy designed his "battery" in switzerland ... the country with a lot of hydropumps
He didn't even come up with it. They idea has been around for a long time. It's even been done as a collage science project, to show how easy it is to make a cheap, low-tech battery. It can use recycled materials as weights, rather than mining rare earth elements to store power. Most models are above ground, to show how they work, but the suggested application is usually to use some abandoned mine shaft or something, to avoid having to dig new holes and cut costs.
While not a terrible idea, using water does sound more practical.
@@davidvondoom2853 Oh my goodness
Oh man, we are so screwed if an idea like this can get the funding for even the CGI mock-up, let alone an actual proof of concept.
Listen, I'm extremely skeptical of energy vault, but let's be real for a second about pumped hydro...
Unless I'm mistaken it's pretty well established that we do not have enough suitable sites for sufficient pumped hydro storage, to say nothing of the location of these sites relative to major urban areas. Also, as we're seeing here in Ontario Canada, pumped hydro projects can get the same type of opposition as wind farms. Some of it pure NIMBY-ism, some of it legitimate concerns about environmental impacts on the local area.
As I said, I'm skeptical of energy vault too. I think there are probably ways to make the basic premise of "lifting heavy things as energy storage" more practical than what they're proposing. But capping off your argument with "Why don't we just do this thing?!" when that thing is inherently not scale-able and geographically limited kind of undercuts your argument.
This. "Why not just use pumped hydro?!" - *gesticulates at flat coastal regions*
@@ThePixel1983 He pointed out that the _easiest_ way of pumped hydro is using natural topography. However the "dig a big hole" method would also work. The startup cost would be huge, but in theory it could be done almost anywhere. One benefit of doing a closed indoor system is that water quality is a non-issue; as long as it doesn't screw up the pumps, generators, and valves, it could be raw sewage, industrial wastewater, or whatever.
Even in the flattest of terrains, surely building a tall silo with a few pumps would require less materials than building a solid tower with massive cranes?
@@nicolaim4275 That water wants to escape in every direction at once, all the time. The blocks just need a strong foundation at ground level. Your silo needs to be strong very high up.
So the issues with pumped hydro storage are effectively the same issue the tower would have in those areas - if it's that flat, then the tower is more exposed to winds and probbly would experience the same amount of nimbyism and legit environmental concerns.
The biggest difference between the two is that hydro pump storage would expect lower startup and maintenance costs compared with the tower. Which sugests we need to find more solutions than just gravity storage batteries.
It also doesn't stack up to water towers, where you will always will have potential energy stored at a minimum height. As you continue to remove blocks from the top , the max height you can drop them from and thus get energy from decreases. Heck, why build the whole thing out of the cement blocks, just build most of it with whatever material or do it off the side of a cliff and sprinkle a few blocks to drop on top of that. Cement is expensive.
Well, if you reduce the amount of blocks (even those at lower levels) you reduce the storage capacity.
And "just do it on the side of a Cliff" only works if you have a cliff. And perhaps not even then.
This idea is stupid. Trying to make it smart is an exercise in futility...
@Gernot Schrader this is why you use a closed landfill for the base and the blocks sit on top :p
@@uprightfossil6673 I was trying to think maybe there’s more energy efficiency with the crane system than the pumps or something but yeah your probably right. You know what’s great about the water system is it can also double as a cool local attraction like a park. The tower ides is just full blow AIDS.
Funny, I started watching this having not heard of this idea. Within the first 10 seconds I was thinking, surely we could get it to do some useful work, like a hydroelectric reservoir, which also can supply water to a city... As someone who has programmed computers, I also laughed at the 'software will handle it' quote - this is only ever used as an argument by people who don't understand programming, the limitations of software and the massive amount of time needed to get a buggy system up-and-running, let alone a failsafe buggy one (no such thing as a system of more than 20 lines of code that is bug-free).
You can get to 20 lines of code without writing a bug? This person is a legend
@@Hex157
print("")
print("")
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print("")
print("")
print("")
print("")
print("")
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print("")
print("")
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print("")
print("")
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There ya go XD
The reason they want to do this is because there are a lot of areas that produce an abundance of solar power but battery storage is insufficient right now, A giant block of heavy mass is a cheaper way to store power. It doesn't have to be concrete, that's a little counter intuitive. But we are working on carbon capture, we could build large blocks out of those or some other nonsense. This video is also clearly from a place that is NOT suffering from drought or is flat so hydro wont work. There's more reasons to support this tech than there are to be against it I guess is my point unless you own a lot of oil stock.
You can get a bit more "bug" free with formal proofs, but that means bug in the sense of "behaves not as specified". Totally forgetting that in interacting with the real world, specifying everything is impossible.
@@tjrclips1 Syntax Error in Line 1: Expected Semicolon ;
Pretty dope and concise video. One potential criticism is you do need a source of large body of water as well as a terrain that lets you pump water up and down (dam or mountain). Not all urban communities have the space or geography to accommodate that. So using the underground gantry version of this actually might actually have a justifiable use casa
Or you could use the next version he showed, using water storage underground with tanks on top. This removes the issue of erosion/arranging as water can't erode/break (it is a liquid) and can be moved way easier than concrete (using pumps instead of a crane). This is almost the same as using two offset water storages, minus the location limitation but with added cost of creating an artificial container above the initial lower water storage.
@@angusheath5321
Geology is the problem. You need specific kinds of rock and geological features to get a watertight reservoir (or at least enough of one to not spring leaks that will cause erosion all the time), or you need to seal all of that with pretty expensive stuff- price for artificial pools goes up very quickly as depth goes up. The underground gantry idea on the other hand just requires reinforced walls to retain the dirt/rock- something much easier to find and much cheaper to build.
The above-ground tower version is and was stupid though.
@@crosshairs007 so basically let's just use water, electrolysis and oxygen+hydrogen, it needs less space
(Though efficiency, expensive hydrogen tanks, liquification of those gasses, and potential danger...)
@@Слышьты-ф4ю Haha gas go boom
@@Wrennbird That's like saying "Haha radioactive waste go brr." Would you like a fun fact? Hydroelectric power has the highest death toll in terms of renewables :) If you mismanage anything energy related enough, people are going to die. We know how to properly store hydrogen, and it's way less of a problem than certain *cough* other energy sources. Sorry, the cough must be allergies and not from the literal tons of waste from coal plants, that are still in service, and give off more radioactive materials than nuclear energy.
"Synthetic self-fixing hyper diamonds"
Your Elon Musk impression is spot on.
That sent me
elons dad could dig some for him :)
that was the point I decided to sub 😂
Like "Software Can Fix It" but for engineering. Let's make a loop shaped hyper diamond and call it DiamondHyperDiamondLoop
@@jakobpetersohn7266 you mean Elon's dad's slaves
There is a similar project currently brewing in Czechia, with no silly towers but not using old abandoned mine shafts, sometimes several hundred meters deep. I see that as a more logical solution (the hole is already dug and unused)
Sure, there are an infinite amount of abandoned mine shafts around that are hundreds of meters deep? Logical solution indeed!
Still a scam.
Still with the relatively small diameter of a mine shaft you cannot store that much energy. Another issue with the mine shafts in my area; they are often partially filled with old concrete etc and they are flooded with water (shafts are up to 700m deep but water level is easily starting at 50m below the surface).
@@anneblankert2005 Projects sometimes make sense in very specific settings but not others. If you have old deep mine shafts why not use them? Price the system out and see how it works out. With a deep shaft you are basically talking about elevator technology and a generator. It's not like trying to develop new battery chemistries and scaling them up. I suspect there are some places where this could be done economically. Old mine shafts, if they are dry, might not be good environments to introduce water, so water pump systems with a closed loop might be more expensive.
No single solution is going to fix everything. I think we are starting to look at better batteries for storing the base load now. For years if you wanted to store power you just kept some coal handy. Then, when we started doing batteries it was for all high density applications like walkmans and phones and electric cars. They were designed to be light weight because they had to be portable. Now that we are looking at baseload storage scientists are looking at new chemistries that don't worry about weight. They focus on cost instead. It doesn't really matter if your battery weighs a lot and is a little bulky if it's sitting in your basement where your furnace used to be.
@@liam3284 but it works best still today, both in cost/feasibility/efficiency and environmental friendliness
All other considerations aside, how are they going to ensure that the fully built tower of blocks is stable? If you were building a permanent tower of concrete like that, it would be necessary to tie all the blocks together with steel ties or similar. As it is, they've just got a tower of loose blocks - I wouldn't go within a mile of that thing.
Bear in mind, these wouldn't have been carefully fitted as with traditional stonework - they've been stacked automatically at a rapid rate and get un-built and rebuilt every few days - how long before it falls over?
Imagine an earthquake topples all of those blocks. How much stored energy would be lost? How much energy would have to be expended resetting the whole mechanism?
@@theunkownbanana1823 I would imagine many of the blocks would suffer damage and chipping so would be unusable. And the machinery would likely be severely damaged also, quite likely by falling blocks.
How long before it falls over? Will it ever stand is what i ask
Software will solve it
and the blocks would get minor wear every time they are stacked/unstacked making it less and less stable
I feel like people are forgetting the biggest problem with this; what if these tall skinny towers with nothing supporting them, fall? There’s literally no skeleton or anything to hold these in place. If one of these things gets swayed by the wind while being lifted up/down and it knocks the tower, it’s gonna be a super high tower of concrete bricks crashing to the ground followed by 5-6 cranes. That sounds safe!
I remember musing on the idea of "gravity storage" years ago. Then, I sat down and did some basic physics calculations and realise the scale of weight (or height) needed made it impractical when using solid weights (I was thinking of storage for individual homes). It is remarkable to see that someone spent more than the $0 and 20 minutes I spent thinking about this and concluded it made sense to move forward.
Oh, what a coincidence! I did exactly this about a year ago as a potential alternative to batteries for individual homes, and came to the same conclusion 😂 Sadly it just doesn't scale very well. But I do think it'd be a cool fixture in some sort of "art project" type home.
I thought of it. Then I remembered we had this with water already in dams and hydraulic plants everywhere, lol. No calculations needed.
@@DudeWatIsThis Exactly. This is the type of idea that is normally thought about, when you hear the words "Why Reinvent the Wheel?".
I love your rating scale for these ideas.
It took you $0 and 20 minutes to conclude it was a bad idea.
See also "Hyperloop", neat idea until I thought about how power it would take to pull the vacuum. You quicky get back to planes or high speed trains. If CA would hear this and cut their losses it would save them many Billions$$$
Lol. I love how you went back to pumped storage as the solution. The moment you showed the tower of vricks I thought "This is stupid, we can pump tower into a resevoir and use hydroelectric damns that aleady exist to reclaim said power. People have been suggesting it for decades and it would be cheap and effective" Your attitude when you got to that point just made my day. Thank you.
Pumping the water up there would take an equal or more amount of energy than that you reclaim.
@@BobSacamano666 That's true. But this whole idea is about storing energy for later use and is based on the fact that electricity prices varies throughout the day. So when the price is cheap the water is pumped up, and when there is high demand, the water flows down and turns turbines to meet the demand. Tom Scott did an excellent video, search for largest battery.
There are multiple of them in France, they're called Step plants
Hydroelectric plants are indeed used to store energy in some places. Tom scott made a video titled "Britain's largest battery is actually a lake" on the topic.
@@ThomasVWorm interesting, isn't any water (ocean) ok for those things? Or do they have some requirements on the quality of water?
I remember when I first had a similar idea to this some time in my high school years. I was imagining massive concrete monoliths in backyard that can be raised/lowered depending on renewable supply. Did some quick napkin math and realised that you'd need such a massive pile of concrete to just cover the energy needs of one household that the entire idea wouldn't be feasible. Not even considering the impact of CO2 emissions etc. And then afterwards coming to the same realisation that dams already exist.
Learning never ends,
so here you go, have some RANDOM comment trying to give you Fun Science-Times:
Veritasium is cool, but Hbomberguy is even better.
Practical Enginnering is also recommend-worthy,
just like Neil Red, It's ok to be smart, Oversimplified, CGP Grey, Tier Zoo, Kozmo, Sci Man Dan, Bob the Science Guy, Creaky Blinder.
And Legal Eagle and Cinema Therapy also are very educational, but these 2 are noteworthy for offering a very new viewpoint for old things.
Dams do NOT solve the scalability issue
@@ziad_jkhan how about a floating dam in the ocean? Basically a bit floating porta-pool that can keep a large body of water at a higher elevation compared to that around it. I wonder what type of materials it would even take to contain it.
@@ziad_jkhan Yes, and they also bring other issues. Either you lose a valley that used to be dry in order to hold the water, or you also lose the fishery that was supported by the river, as fish and dams don't play well together. We've been tearing out a bunch of ours in recent decades because we didn't need so much power and the damage to the fisheries was so large. The Grand Coulee Dam has never been run at 100% of it's theoretical capacity as there's never been a need to install generators in the remaining positions.
@@anon746912 buoyancy only works if the density of the upper fluid is lower than the bottom fluid. In other words: if you fill a ship with water, it sinks.
So if you want to keep a large body of water above the ocean water level you'd either have to fix it to the ocean floor or have a much larger "ship" with an air gap below the water tank in which you'd fill just the tank above that air gap, and that air gap would likely have to have a larger volume than the water tank itself
It is astonishing that investors would back this idea. One ratio that is out of whack is the required investment per kWh of energy storage. Cranes are very expensive pieces of machinery. Touchy, sensitive, and requiring great skill to operate and maintain.
The video mentions wind, the mortal enemy of tower cranes. The usual rule is that you must shut the crane down before the wind hits 40 mph. The maintenance expense would also prove to be a problem. The ropes wear out and have to be replaced regularly. It’s a big, expensive job every time. The structure also develops fatigue cracks that require expensive repair performed by skilled ironworkers and welders. The “duty cycle” would be equivalent to near constant operation moving the full rated load. Very destructive.
Finally, utility-scale capacity would come only with immense outlays. This thing is an expensive toy and a science experiment that will serve to test things that are already known. It’s not cost effective, and this could have been shown on paper without building a thing.
This is what happens when you sorta listened in physics class and don't feel like actually thinking about it
No its like when you actually did listen in physics class, but only up until the point where you take gravity as a constant, friction and air resistance are negligible, wind doesnt exist and things dont break ever.
The physics is correct though. It's the implementation that being criticized. Like why use concrete to store potential energy when we can just use water? The largest pumped hydro 'battery' station in the US is in my state and it's been operating since 1985. The issue with pumped hydro is it only works in very specific geographies.
@@delos2279 The physics in the video is correct, and this could technically serve as a battery, but the assumption that it is in any way an effective battery is not.
@@UnderEuropa which means you didn't bloody listen, did you ;)
@@5h4d0w5l1f3 It is effective as a battery though. That was even conceded in the video. And mechanical batteries are generally more environmentally friendly than chemical batteries.
The claim was that pumped hydro is better. Which is true. But that's true of hydro power generally, not just gravity batteries. The issue Adam didn't realize or left out is that geographically pumped hydro, like all hydro, is extremely limited. Most of the areas that support it already have it. Hydro is generally the best form of power so Adam might as well have been condescendingly saying 'just live near rivers and mountains.' That's not making a point.
Generally don't look to youtube video essays as a reliable source to debunk scientific research. Maybe your science classes were not advanced enough to learn that.
Their last iteration of the idea actually has a gantry crane stacking blocks in a square building formation rather than a round tower. Looks like someone was taking notes from this video.
just wait til it switches to water for another iteration ^^
To me it looks like the designer is pretty smart for coming up with a dumb idea so they can crowdsource better ways to do this at no cost to them.
That was the plan all along. Pitch something interesting and plausible to non-experts, get their investment, do pretend research fixing problems one by one that are already known to experts, deplete the funds. Declare the failure. Rinse and repeat with a new idea to new investors
Its still a bad idea
Why not just use water... so dumb.
I once thought water towers could act the same way and then an engineering friend looked into it and he basically said batteries are already better so I dropped the idea.
Well I mean they do and they don't sure a battery can hold a larger charge for cheaper but said battery ages so it needs replacing and also that is without mentioning location and temperature. Any and all batteries don't like cold or hot (well except for some exotic batteries but those haven't reached real production yet) or even better is that it allows for amplification of local hills and valleys making what would be a mediocre hydroelectric battery into actually worthwhile. Sadly though while their maintenance at least long term looking at current battery technology modern electric pumps are really really efficient at what they do meaning there is little room for the tech to improve in a meaningful way unlike batteries. They do still have uses even then though!
(Also side note any misspellings or poor phrasing is do to me typing this at 1 am)
@@gemmasterian4496 Even modern mass produced LiFePo4 batteries have full cycle charges in excess of 3000, while remaining above 80% capacity at the end of their life.
Full daily cycling is around 10 years, and with much better density and deployment locations, and they're likely to work well beyond that. Compared to the maintenance on a series of cranes and concrete....
It does work if you make the reservoir large enough, pumped hydro works very well as grid storage but it requires specific terrain to set up.
Batteries are not better than water towers, because water towers have already been built in large quantities. Your engineering friend didn't consider all the variables.
pumped storage is great, but it does require favorable geography and oftentimes flooding existing developments. That is just to say it isn't idiocy to consider other forms of gravity storage. though, yeah, this tower is dumb. if you are in an arid climate or land area is at a premium, maybe you just have to rely on chemical storage? what do you think
Chemical storage is just a regular battery, isn't it? Considering most forms of batteries can explode under pressure, probably a bad idea.
@@bable6314 it could be a battery or some other chemistry like making hydrogen. certainly, if done properly, the risk of explosions is well mitigated. Batteries (in the general sense of chemical, gravity or other forms of storage) are completely essential to get off fossil fuels (which all also explode by the way). chemical batteries are not a significantly larger risk than existing technology
The heavier weight of concrete or stone does have the benefit of higher energy density for a height traveled which is similar to another old technology called a hydraulic accumulator. Basically, a big vertical cylinder with a heavy weighted piston. Water is pumped into it, lifting the weight to store energy. The constant-ish pressurized water was then available to run hydraulic machinery. Historically this was used to operate cranes and other heavy machinery with earlier steam engines
No problem with high-pressure leaks?
Time to make it out of mercury!
@@sofieselene or nuclear fuel waste!
this really doesn't scale up well
Sure but that isn't really an issue, is it? We have plenty of space and plenty of (non-drinkable) water. Any efficiency you gain is simply obliterated by how simple and effective a hydro-electric battery is. Economies of scale galore.
Unlike the extremely simple mechanics of a water storage system, Energy Vault relies on multiple complex crane systems all working in complete synchronization. A single point failure would render the entire system inoperable and repair logistics would be measured in days and weeks rather than minutes and hours.
I read this in Adam's voice.
Other than that, you can also just install a flywheel to store power.
@@sybrandwoudstra9236 Flywheels are all but useless for anything but very short term storage and even at that the efficiency is marginal. And please don't bother coming back to me with a bunch of hype from yet another Kickstarter company with nothing to show but a bunch of CGI concepts.
And one more thing.... crane ropes need inspections, greasing and changing more often than you think - 6 of them would most likely see 5 in action at any one time. Great video :)
And neither wind turbines or any other turbine or power plants need service and inspection lmao It has draw backs but that isnt one.
@@outlander234 perhaps, I did a quite bit of googling, it seems both crane ropes and thing such as turbine blades need an inspection twice a year, however the wind turbine blades can be done in some cases with a drone/magnified photography. Crane ropes are layered in grease and must be inspected manually.
"6 would see 5 in action"
Make that 4, I think.
Because it looks like the cranes are supposed to serve as counterweights for each other, and a big crane without a counterweight is bad news.
I always forget how the briefness of that video hammers your point HARD.
Yet another point you didn't consider: This concept only ever makes sense if there is any actual height difference between your blocks. And the less height difference there is, the less energy you can extract. So your "empty" situation basically is all blocks at the same level (so you _could_ replace the "inner" block up to that level simply with a solid foundation), and the lower your storage goes the less efficient your system becomes (because you have constant time attach/detach operations -> the lower your delta goes the higher your waste). And lets not even talk about the crane arms travelling empty half of the time.
This isn't revolution, this is just a logistics nightmare.
These people should try and play Factorio or Satisfactory so they could learn a thing or two about thermodynamics...
@@ruffusgoodman4137 These people should go to school instead of playing games, lol, at least learn some first-year physics.
But the problem isn't intellectual and educational deficits in these CEO types. It's the intellectual and educational deficits in the shareholders - any idiot can buy promises made by any idiot if he's got money to invest.
@@pwnmeisterage A good point.
And there is another issue with the cranes which i haven't seen mentioned so far (unless I am missing part of the point OP is making) Not only is attaching and detaching wasting time, but the whole lifting process is - the higher the tower gets, the worse the problem becomes (part of the reason why it takes so long to load and unload container vessels). The further a crane needs to travel - both up and down and side to side - the more time it takes. Therefore it has not only a limited energy output capacity, but the energy intake capacity is similarly limited.
@@pwnmeisterage I meant the games as to patronize his seemingly ignorant mind.
Games help a troubled head to get along with science (sometimes. FFS Fortnite isn't a useful game for instance)
That's another good point, which makes pumping water up a hill way more efficient. You don't have to pile water up
Its everytime wonderful to see how investors pump their "stupid money" into projects that are apperently dumb.
But... technology...
I already doubled and sold my investment in NRGV. It's definitely not a buy and hold kinda stock, just a quick in and out. ;)
I bet a lot of them are tax scams
It's so they can "write off" the "loss" when it "fails" for what they put in, lowering their taxable income, so they aren't hit with the high rates, and get to keep more of their income... and get a huge tax refund in the process.
What we need is to take money out of the angel investors hands and make investment about smaller micro investments then this stupid shit can die in a trash fire and anyone who pulls like a Fyre festival would never see a dime of investment again. Aka I’d never see the word Elon ever again and the word musk would be reserved for books about beavers
And I was so looking forward for these self building Jenga towers. 😆
BTW, people give wind turbines a lot of criticism for being too noisy. You think a thing like this wouldn't generate sound?
Living next to this would be like living next to a permanent construction site!
@Madolite yeah some people don't seem to realize if you're going to make a useful renewable energy generation option "put it in the middle of buttfuck nowhere" is a very useful option to have
@rob dom OH NOES, imagine if there where places where people didnt live where we could build them instead, what a shame
@@iShionSinX Placing power generation on the outskirts of cities is good thinking, but it can't be too far away! It costs energy to transport energy. Long distance cables need to be built of better and better materials the longer the cable length or you need to have transformer outposts every once in a while to regulate power. It gets pretty expensive to maintain the network. People won't be able to afford the electric bill.
@@robdom91 true. Even though you can place it in the middle of nowhere, the closer you can put the generator to where the electricity is going, the better it's gonna be.
@@robdom91 Isnt that how we already do tho?
As an engineering student, I was blown away the first time I saw a pumped storage facility in the '80s - unfortunately the idea did not gain much momentum under a reagan and watt government - odd right?
This made me go from "This block tower idea is pretty interesting" to "this block tower idea is stupid" within minutes.
I gotta say, that experience on itself is the most interesting.
guillable, much?
@@SebastianA.W. gullible
minor spelling mistake point denied
@@haoxuan7909 lol is this what things have come to? can't deny me opinion, the dude litterally changed his mind in 5 minutes. i hereby forfait any future social credit gain in the name of doing whatever i want. can keep ur points and give em to those that give a damn about them ;-)
@@SebastianA.W. Just waving away curiosity is what causes people to double down and think bad ideas are good, don't be a dick and immediately make fun of people who are curious, teach them so they can be curious in the right direction.
@@SebastianA.W. people need to consider implications.
Being introduced to a new idea that solves a problem will initially sound good, especially if you are aware of the problem beforehand.
This video introduced a solution to a known problem, gave some pros before talking about problems inherent in the solution.
The format of the video, including the title and the thumbnail, is making people go from "good idea, why not do that?" to "oh, that's why it's bad".
Accusing anyone of being gullible because of this is either being ignorant or being a jerk. This video takes curiosity and teaches to apply critical thinking. It is acting to oppose gullibility. It is educational about the concept by using a real life example.
The whole thing is too well done for the video to simply be about the energy storage via gravitational potential energy instead of electric potential.
As Peter Thiel said in his book, "green energy" companies are headed by salesmen, not engineers, so it often ends up going nowhere after the initial hype. Those guys are like kick starter gurus but with access to bigger bag of cash.
Well and the people they need to convince are investors, not engineers or experts. It's the blind leading the blind.
But.... hydro electricity storage is not only green, but is also practical energy?
@@ryanscott1680 is it company tho ?
Right now the main point of green energy is to generate votes, not energy. It's why the same people who are against fossil fuels are also against nuclear energy: they want that lowest common denominator vote for themselves, not for the environment. They aren't interested in what happens with energy after they're in office.
@@RendezvousWithRama Still doesnt mean you shouldn't place your votes or interest in the party that actively wants green energy, rather than the party who lets oil companies run rampant without regulation, and rally against any form of green energy
As a mechanical engineer, I can imagine the maintenance nightmares of this thing. This is nothing other than science fantasy by someone who barely knows how real things work
You know for a fact this thing will only be running on 2 out of the 6 cranes all the time because they just can't be bothered to fix the other ones.
Exactly. I've designed winches and cranes, and I see so many cost and reliability issues. Those cables wear out pretty quickly when they're used continuously, like on rope shovels. And they're expensive, and take some time to replace. I think they skipped the whole feasibility study phase of this project. Or else it's just a big scam.
"science fantasy" isn't that precisely the definition of science that to become science an hypothesis must be validated by experience ?
not only that, but it is financially unfeasible. the more time i devote to thinking about this stupid tower, the dumber i feel, and it wasn't even my stupid idea!
@@lolaa2200 No. Fantasy implies a mystical element. You know, like witches and dragons. Science fiction has become reality before (but not nearly as often as you'd think, nor in the ways you'd hope it would-personal flying cars that use antigravity, multi-mile high skyscrapers, or faster than light travel still have yet to become realities and possibly never will. But hey, we've gotten the 60s Star Trek communicators, and ours can do WAY more than theirs could).
I just watched a video that explained the problem with pumped hydro: the energy density is very low. You need to have a huge reservoir with as much difference between the top and bottom portion as possible. So, you can't put that just anywhere. And I will add that evaporation is surely an issue in some places. So, we're looking for an alternative gravity battery. Maybe this design sucks; so, what else can we come up with? I like the idea of rolling a really heavy train up a hill or something. No, I don't know how the control of moving it up and down would work.
I proposed my own idea of how this could work recently. While not a detailed explanation, maybe you could better flush out the concept? Any contribution or differing ideas will be happily appreciated.
@@caydenwootton7293 , I found a lot more under the term "gravity battery". And apparently these things are being built and used, though it appears to still be a pretty new technology. For the most part, it looks like a weight held by cables is the way, though not like that stacking thing.
at the beginning i was like “there’s no way he can just debunk this whole thing in 3 minutes”.
then he did.
but he didn't lol
@@deangregoric4735 but he did tho.
@@eeberee really? He brought up few points of which he doesn't have any proof to back it up if it's really a "issues" and then in the end he's solution is something that already exists. I first thought that the guy was trolling but based on content I found out that he was actually serious. Now question is how serious is he's audience?
@@deangregoric4735 🤓
Oh but also water isn’t available everywhere and concrete is used in dams too so it isn’t really a fair comparison without showing numbers , they aren’t perfect either
This concept does sort of exist on a very small scale. There are lights designed for third world countries that are powered by a heavy bag being slowly lowered to the floor. Every 30 minutes a person picks up the bag and resets the device. Good for kids doing their homework.
So I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if a larger version has a niche. There are certainly places where water is scarce, or where hills are scarce, which makes pumped storage hydro either not viable or far less viable. Maybe a remote desert base? Bring the crane and some bags, fill the bags with rocks. Not sure if that’s better that a chemical battery, but it might be cheaper, or lighter within very specific capacity and discharge rate requirements.
Wouldn't places with scarce water tend to be well-equipped for solar energy?
@@nicolaim4275 people have activities at night, and providing batteries for the solar cell might not be economical.
@@awl649 Individual people have activities, sure, but generally power consumption goes down considerably during the night. A power plant based on burning organic waste from farm production and food consumption could compensate if the rest of the system is predictable.
With LED lights efficiency and battery costs, I doubt the dynamo method will last. Simple low-quality solar with a cheap battery attached to LED lasts all night.
Just look at this lawn solar lights selling for $2-3 each
@@nicolaim4275 Antarctica has very little liquid water (pumped storage doesn’t work so well if water is a solid), same with the arctic. They have several months a year without daylight, let alone good conditions for solar panels.
I always wonder if people who make projects like these KNOW they're selling nonsense and are cynically hoping their cool CGI will be sufficient to get some sweet, sweet investor money or if they genuinely believe in their own nonsense.
The first one. When you think about the problem of energy surplus and deficit, you are smart enough to Google things. Those are "smart" frauds nothing else they try it 5 Times. Some money will Flow in eventually
They know that there's a sucker born every minute.
To be fair, I can't blame these people for wanting to dupe reddit kids so they don't need to work again. I mean you have the choice of, work as a waiter at minimum wage or go to university for a couple years and then make a CGI presentation. Its all a symptom of our broken work place.
@@OrechTV But the investors can also google stuff. And ask - "Why should I invest in your project and not pumped storage?"
It's not even cool CGI. It looks like they used the cheapest offer on some gig platform.
Now, not to defend the gravity storage with concrete blocks, but water pump storage does have problems, that this solution doesn’t have and therefor might be applicable in a use-case.
As an example absolutely flat terrain with little to no water.
Adam I gotta tell you you really got me with this one, I was flabbergasted when your idea didn’t turn into a train.
Lol right? Drive train up hill with lots of cars. Let train roll down hill. What can't trains do?
Lookup Advanced Rail Energy Systems ;)
@@JamesBoullion they can't go to space.
*yet*
@@redmoon383 That's what the space ladder is for!
Would it not become obsolete once about half the blocks are dropped? As the area to stack them would be higher than the area you drop them from.
Could be. Also they don't go into how much energy they would use lifting the blocks vs how much they gain by dropping them.
Using physics principles it should be the same. But only in a frictionless and vacuum world. Probably still had better energy retention than a battery though.
@@joshuaa7266 At 1:57 it said "90% round trip efficiency", but of course that could easily be a very optimistic number for promotion. It also shows, at 1:10, that the diamater roughly doubles for the dropped blocks compared to the stacked blocks. So 3 times as many blocks fit into the lower pile (2^2 - 1 for the original stack), such that they will be at even height when the original stack is at 25% of its max height.
I believe the idea was for them to be arrayed in a comparatively shallow circle on the ground, hence the long cranes, and then stacked back up.
yes but there are ways round it (not that i think its a good idea)
This project immediately goes from 'this is neat' to 'it'll never work' when someone brings up wind or damage.
If one block on the top cracks and the crane can't grip it, then that's a whole section of blocks stock under it now made useless until it can be removed.
Or, if one block lower down starts cracking then that is a massive danger where who knows how much of the stack could fall over in almost any direction if things get worse.
Medium scale pumped hydro for areas that can't fix larger stations would be much much more feasible than this Jenga battery.
There are a lot of alternatives that is being developed because of specific problems with pumped storage hydro-electricity.
th-cam.com/video/mHmIVw9etns/w-d-xo.html
here is a very nice video showcasing all the "real options" and not just some futuristic cgi.
Like they actually used real science, and they showcase the problems with it and how they think they can avoid it!
You could use modified hasco blocks full of gravel or dirt and just ditch the concrete block idea altogether.
Doesn't make it any less useless in any other capacity, but it could work.
Jenga battery. I like that.
the only good things about these "futuristic energy devices" and "transportation-fixing marvels" are that they look cool from an untrained eye and that's it
The problem with pumped hydroelectricity is that it's VERY hard to find a suitable location for it, and even then, the nature costs are immense
That's not the only problem. The other is that the energy you get per area of water is generally quite low. So it's utterly infeasible for scaling up. This is one way the concrete is actually better, though I am not sure why you'd use a million tiny blocks instead of a few large ones.
@@satekeeper Concrete is kinda dumb though. The point it is not drastically more dense than water is valid (this video is terrible, btw). Metal would be a much more long lasting and energy dense solution, which would make it easier to compensate for its carbon cost.
@@louisvictor3473 or for that matter you could just use rock. Concrete is a great construction material because you can shape it to whatever form easily. But for a gravity energy storage system with just a few large weights, you don't need that. Then you get higher density and low carbon cost
@@louisvictor3473 You can literally just lift a kilogram of trash and it's energy storage is the same as a kilogram of concrete
THANK YOU
So yeah the idea to use the same principle isn't too bad. But using a much simpler design as shown towards the end of the video is a must. Why not just a warehouse with a sentry crane?
I love how in your latest videos you bring it around to existing "innovations."
You prove a thought I had for along time - investments in "cool technology" might make people feel better because we like to think of ourselves as this brilliant species that makes stuff, but in my mind it's time and resources that could be spent on... hmmm, I don't know land and water conservation and regenerative agriculture subsidies to make sure the right practices of producing food are incentivized.
Exactly. We're a species that, unfortunately, frequently confuses snake oil salespeople for innovative geniuses because we're hard-wired to want an easy, low-effort solution to a problem.
We believe what we want to hear, which unfortunately is normally "now, just give me all that lovely money, and in return you shall have this new shiny thing that will solve everything...thank you and goodbyeeeeeeee!"
@@peterclarke7240 Learning never ends,
so here you go, have some RANDOM comment trying to give you Fun Science-Times:
Veritasium is cool, but Hbomberguy is even better.
Practical Enginnering is also recommend-worthy,
just like Neil Red, It's ok to be smart, Oversimplified, CGP Grey, Tier Zoo, Kozmo, Sci Man Dan, Bob the Science Guy, Creaky Blinder.
And Legal Eagle and Cinema Therapy also are very educational, but these 2 are noteworthy for offering a very new viewpoint for old things.
We are a brilliant species that makes stuff up, that's why we already came up with those innovations. But we also like to think there are those revolutionary singular geniuses instead of everything actually being invented by evolutionary iteration and collaboration.
@@slevinchannel7589 Thank you for the recommendations (I know about half of them). I'm confused as to why, though?
It's called ecomodernism, look it up. It's all meant to profit on our collective eagerness to buy the easy solutions, while distracting us from the real solutions.
Old railcars corkscrewing around a hill, fill 'em up with rubble, old concrete and heavy crap that was going to get landfilled anyway. Use the rails as busbars or run some overhead wires, and you have something that can store a whole bunch of potential energy in areas where water might be at a premium. This isn't exactly a new idea either, but I guess it doesn't look as pretty in CG.
As always the best solution is just trains
@@onder6072 OK, now I'm imagining a steampunk-type society where their whole problem-solving culture is built around "How can we do this with a train?"
"Software will handle it" and that software will need to developed, tested, constantly (and I mean constantly) updated, have multiple, fail-safes and You'll need hardware and machinery optimised for that software and all that will add TONS of cost
While the energy vault is dumb, pumped storage hydro is very location dependent and the footprint is a lot bigger (and evaporation / seepage / weather / water use concerns). We can store energy thermally in rocks - create well insulated boxes full of rocks and connect them to a heat exchange loop and a turbine. Excess energy in the system is used to heat water (100% efficiency) and then when you extract it, it drives a turbine which is normal efficiency. Perfectly scalable, tamper-proof, engineering so easy it's boring, applicable to literally any environment, mobile, cheap as rocks. If you replace rocks with water in this set up, similar to as described in the video, you get a higher energy density (for an application that is very scalable so why?) for the trade-off of thermal expansion, corrosion, water vapour pressure, easily tampered with, sloshing during transport, algal growth, contaminants, etc.
So I think hot rocks in a box could be a better solution than all this techno-marketing bullshit, and possibly better than even hydro storage.
Look up thermosolar salt storage :)
You can couple this with compressed air storage, too - the thermal reservoir takes up heat during the compression phase and adds it back in when released.
Have a look for the pumped hydro storage atlas
Yes, it is location dependent, but most countries have pretty well developed electrical grids so they can put their storage anywhere. As long as the country has any kind of suitable location anywhere near its grid, it could use pumped storage. I imagine a few very small, very flat countries might not be able to manage it, but most countries would have somewhere with the right terrain to do it.
@@mikelms20 I was about to say this, molten salt melted by concentrated light.
I love when the optimizations ends up creating an old, well established solution
@Professor Frog Where do you live where there isn't a hill close to a settlement? North Dakota? This is viable for most places.
@@veemie8148 Clearly his brain is so smooth he can not imagine places that are not as smooth as itself.
- Pumping a mass of water is less efficient than lifting an equivalent solid mass with a pulley
- Pumped storage is only efficient to implement when the natural landscape facilitates it; "energy vault" does not have this restriction
@@gershommaes902 - Energy vault is limited to an extremely small capacity, and loses potency fairly quickly on "stored power" the further up you go.
-Energy Vault is absurdly higher in cost to maintain, most likely also requiring considerable earthworking to make viable in the slightest...
And benefits more from water, less failiures more efficient far simpler, far longer lifespan.
You can most *definitely* put them all over. A hill is not a rare occurence, hell anywhere with even a mild slope could be a viable canidate, it simply has to be high*er.* Further out of course would mean more pump work, unless you create another aquaduct/pipe in the opposite direction feeding back.
Or simply more involved earthworks and engineering for something of a MUCH higher capacity, with a MUCH larger lifespan, with much simpler process to maintain. No advanced components that could easily fail, or fuck up too badly.
You do have the risk of a failiure of course, however with the hydro route, you can easily design a suitable failsafe channel. (Unless some jackass "improves" your design 20 years down the line, overloads your design, and overloads the failsafe entirely)
@Professor Frog Hey, where's your furry pfp? Or MLP/Anime Pfp? Which one's worse than a furry? Either way it needs to fit your comment.
"Where are hills? Do they just appear/exist on their own???" Yes, it's called Terrain. Landscape, Geography. The Romans knew how to take advantage of it.
Maybe you should stop looking stupider than a primitive civilization 2000 years gone?
I love your short form of this! Who knew that stacking concrete in a cylinder in windy areas surrounded by mountains wasn't the most ideal form of energy storage?
Another thing with the cranes is the more you use the battery the less energy you actually get back out of it. A block at 100ft is going to net you more energy than a block at 50ft purely due to the height. So unlike traditional batteries and even water systems, the output is going to slowly start diminishing as you use it which makes it unreliable and kinda stupid
Even as an engineering student, this just seems incredibly stupid to me; it seems incredibly unsafe, even if it were mostly isolated away from people by being placed in wind farms, by being composed of loose bricks. A 4 year old could tell you that stacking blocks up high loosely is a bad idea.
… a bad idea as in every cathedral, who's architects did not know that stacking stones is a bad idea.
I believe they built one in Switzerland, surprised it wasn’t checked out for this video.
@@UlrichRoss stone cathedrals are held to gather with mortar, not free stacked like this structure would be. This is a giant Jenga tower and it wouldn't be a question of if it would fall, but when.
If only they learned to code software at kindergarten...
@@UlrichRoss Actually in all the big cathedrals they had to come back later and add steel straps and pulling bars so that it doesn't tumble down. Of course in the CGI virtual visit you don't see them (it's software ;c) ) but if you have the chance to visit one for real you'll see theses.
Honestly, even if we just stick to the idea of "lifting and releasing something very heavy", why not just have one VERY heavy block (possibly made out of un-recyclable waste materials), which is lifted higher and higher with energy surplus, and then released gradually when the energy is needed? What's the point in stacking a bunch of blocks?
Cool cgi
How high would you put a single block? That sounds ludicrous.
Also, the cost of raising something up with a cable increases exponentially with total height, as the cable has a mass and needs to support itself. It's a very common problem in long elevator designs.
Yes, this concept exists adn operates in some places. Using old mine shafts that go down deep enough and have huge ass elevators already. Scaling up to a lot of locations becomes a problem though
@@Darkxellmc of course, you recover energy from the cable going down as well.
ok to be honest a the idea of going sightseeing and encountering "the cube of energy" is funny
Oh man, the slow evolution of the concept into pumped storage was genius. I knew exactly where it was going but still absolutely genius.
- Pumping a mass of water is less efficient than lifting an equivalent solid mass with a pulley
- Pumped storage is only efficient to implement when the natural landscape facilitates it; "energy vault" does not have this restriction
Instead of a bunch of blocks, my concept was a single mass (per station) of a bunch of waste materials in shipping containers that goes up/down incrementally. This would also allow for that mass to lift a heavier mass an increment when it is full.
Other ideas include pressurized air (we could perform some chemistry at high pressure to only release oxygen and nitrogen back into the atmosphere
We really should be sequestering lead and a few other poisonous materials in such a manner. Concrete is a horrible example.
Short, sweet and straight to the point. And as someone who works in tech, thank you so damn much for pointing out that "software" isn't frikkin magic pixie dust.
At least not until the beta magic pixie dust update comes out.
Oh come on you need some faith in software Jesus
But seriously. People who think you can just defy logic and laws of physics with software are just brain dead. Why not just create free energy with this magic software? Cut out this concrete middleman and create perpetual motion machines and free energy creators with this software fairy.
@@therealspeedwagon1451 I always let Jesus take my keyboard when I need a new coding solution. :)
I just wish he would return them again :(
And yet, drones are known to fly stably in pretty strong winds. Software?? Nah, it's magic of course.
@@tzenophile
Okay... Connect that stable drone to the lower end of a massive, dangling cable (many times the mass and profile area of the drone) that is being whipped around by unpredictable gusts of wind, and give the drone a massive load (the block grabber with its actuators that must be failsafe), also swinging in the wind, to be precisely oriented over a block that butts-up against other blocks... If one of the four actuators fails, Murphy's Law says it will fail 80m above the ground, and the grabber cannot be moved without risking toppling a 35T block of concrete from the top of the stack... Good luck with that! Once one incident happens, the entire storage battery must be shutdown until its perfect operation can be resumed...
The first thing I thought was: "Why not just pump water around?" "Wait, aren't they doing it already?" so I'm glad you brought it up
It would be interesting to see a bit more delving into pumped hydro without the hill. Pumped hydro with a hill is surprisingly difficult to create: it needs very specific terrain to work well. It's great if you have the right terrain and low population density, say northern Scotland, or the Azores. But it's not a scalable solution for most cities.
True, but the problem is the cost. These sorts of hydroelectric power storage are already super expensive to build. Adding an artificial replacement for natural hills would make it even more so. Maybe this would still be worth it for certain areas, but I think standard industrial batteries would probably be a better solution for space-limited areas.
*Although I like a few of his videos, but the arrogance with this guy is just through the roof.*
If PSH worked for every case there wouldn't be any need for any other storage solution (Plus they are expensive, need specific topography, and destroy environments). So what does he suggest :
- Stacking the blocs in a wall-like structure to help with the wind *chuckle*
- Digging a tower deep hole once again to help with the wind (cost, feasibility, sanity really...)
- Creating a lake deep underground, then putting another lake on top of it, with the turbine is at the same level as the top lake *intensive facepalm*
I won't go into the details about why this video (and many others on this channel)is a sham, maybe pull the wool over people's eyes, and as someone working in the field, I feel insulted.
I think density is really not a big deal in this case. I live in Belgium (20th country in term of density) and there is one. I can tell you it takes very few space, and we are not living on top of each other so i guess there is plenty of space to build that in other countries. See Coo Hydroelectirc power station
What about, you know, where there is something, let's call it an electrical grid, that allows you to produce electrical energy in one place while storing it in another, better suited place. Sounds totally futuristic, I know.
@@DarthChrisB There's always some loss in transmission, though that's fairly minimal compared to the efficiency of the actual storage devices. Still, if you saw the Last Week Tonight episode on power grids like I did, you know that a shift to renewable energy production will require a massive overhaul of transmission grids to get power from the windmills/solar/hydroelectric generators to the cities.
In Norway, it is common for hydropowerplants (which we have hundreds/thousands of) to pump up water when there is excess power (such as when there's too much wind in Denmark and we get the power for free).
The energy loss is only roughly 30%. Pretty neat.