“New” Concept in Energy Storage

Here’s a piece on a subject we haven’t talked too much about recently: energy storage.  In this case, it’s analogous to pumped hydro (see left) or advanced rail energy storage, both of which take off-peak energy and use it to raise a mass against the force of gravity, increasing its potential energy.  Then when needed, the mass can be allowed to fall, transferring that energy into electricity.

This guy proposes to install systems like these in abandoned oil wells, making use of the fact that the holes in the Earth’s surface have already been dug.

Is this a big deal?  I doubt it.

Yes, energy storage of this type requires elevation change, and thus cannot be sited in places like Kansas.  Yet this technology, which comes from Newton (ca. 1660) and Faraday (ca. 1830) doesn’t appear to hold much promise in a world in which battery technology is improving every day.

Btw, the piece linked above is called “Batteries that run on gravity.”  I don’t know whether this is an innocent mistake or a deliberately misleading attempt to explain the concept, but it’s incorrect.  Obviously, it doesn’t invoke batteries (electrochecmical storage) of any kind. But more to the point, it doesn’t “run on gravity.”  There is no energy in gravity; it’s rather a force, and moving objects around in a force field either requires external energy or releases energy, according to whether the objects are moved opposing or in the direction of the force.