Scottish start-up Gravitricity has secured a £912,000 grant from the UK Department of Business Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to build a 4 MWh gravity-based storage facility on an unspecified brownfield site in the United Kingdom.
“The feasibility project will complete in late 2022 and will provide the information required to commence the build of the full-scale commercial prototype multi-weight gravity energy store immediately thereafter, subject to securing planning permission and the necessary funds,” the company said in a statement. “This project will demonstrate multi-weight use and control using a single set of hoisting equipment and will pave the way to custom projects which can be built wherever they are required.”
Image: Gravitricity
The company completed last summer a 250 kW demonstration project, which was supported by a £640,000 grant from UK government funder Innovate UK. In this facility, a tower is powered by renewable energy to raise a mass in a 150-1,500 m shaft and discharges the electricity thus “stored” by releasing the mass to rotate the two power generators. The mass used in larger projects can range from 500 to 5,000 tons.
The technology is claimed to have a faster response time than lithium-ion storage technology and to be able to help stabilize electricity networks at 50 Hz by responding to full power demand in less than a second.
In October, Gravitricity also announced it was considering the deployment of its gravity energy storage system in Czechia, where it would be built at the decommissioned Staříč coal mine in the country's Moravian Silesian region. The mine consists of six deep sites that could potentially host the storage solution.
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There are numerous “Brownfield” sites everywhere which can’t be used for anything and certainly not to have people on or about those lands.
Making use of such for Energy Storage Systems and other “passive:” functions is certainly a good idea (provided it does not disturb the toxins). In one sense this is recovering the “space” and can also serve as a “capping” over the site pending on the use…
What was the capacity and efficiency of the small-scale demonstration project? It says “250kW” power, but that’s less interesting than its capacity.
Hey Steve, the storage capacity of the pilot project was not specified by the manufacturer.
The demonstrator at Leith in Edinburgh was 15 m and 50 t giving a maximum capacity of 7.5 MJ or 2.1 kWh. If it delivered 250 kW as claimed, then it would have done so for just 30 s.
If built to the largest scale they are proposing, i.e. 1,500 m and 5,000 t, it will have a capacity of 75 GJ or 21,000 kWh.
Sounds like absolute nonsense
Building a load of infrastructure for pitifully small capacity
Please let the grown ups review it based on physics and hard nosed economic benefits and compare with properly conceived alternatives
Pump water up a hill instead – the engineering is much more straightforward straightforward and capacity scales much more effectively
It’s efficiency should be really good if they can sort the bearings and gearing in a viable way. Amazing how powering a domestic heater for an hour using 50 tons can attract such funding;)