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A Californian company proposes using weighted electrically-driven rail vehicles on inclines to store energy. At times when the capacity of electricity supply exceeds demand the vehicles would be driven up inclined tracks, and when demand exceeds generation they are allowed to run down, generating electricity as they fall.
This link includes a video that shows a prototype vehicle (which appears to be built on a conventional locomotive chassis), an interview with a promoter, and an animation of a "farm" of these devices. There is a shortage of hard data, such as how much energy could be stored, for how long, and how steep the tracks are, etc., but a quick calculation shows that some thousands of these vehicles would be required for them to be useful. The control panel for this prototype has a power dial that appears to go up to only 20 kW. The promoter in the interview focuses instead on how the construction material can be recycled at end of life.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:11PM (4 children)
"And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? We call it ridin' the gravity train!"
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:16PM (3 children)
Neat idea. Can they integrate it into existing infrastructure?
I'm imagining like the San Fran trolleys, but attach lead weights under them. They carry them up the hill when energy is in excess, and down when it's in shortage.
Just need an automated loading/unloading/storage system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:21PM (2 children)
I'm sure the tourists on the trolley are willing to wait at the bottom of the hill until threre's a surplus of supply. And remain on the trolley at the top so the energy used to lift them can be recovered when its needed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:35PM
I think that's what the automated loading/unloading is about - the trains don't need to wait at the top of the hill to store energy, only the weights do.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:44PM
So basically open 2 beavertail shops - one at the top of the hill and one at the bottom?
When energy is short, open the one at the bottom of the hill and the tourists go down.
When energy is excess, open the one at the top of the hill and tourists go up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:15PM (23 children)
Why is an article like this on the front page?
You can't store "2 to 3 gigawatts" because wattage is a rate of power delivery or rate of energy per unit time. 3 gigawatt seconds is less than one kilowatt year. To know how much power it stores we need a unit of energy and not power.
This article is useless and written by a marketing drone, rather than anyone who is competent to evaluate its relevance.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:35PM (10 children)
SoylentNews constantly runs bullshit pop "science" like this these days. It's nearly as bad as Slashdot.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by takyon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:40PM (7 children)
A journalist used the wrong unit. In an article from 2 years ago. Boo fucking hoo, AC.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:25PM (6 children)
Dismiss it all you like, but the question remains: how much energy is it supposed they store this way?
And all for the want of a proper unit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:02PM (5 children)
How long is the train?
How heavy is each car.
How fast is it allowed to roll?
Arguing about an un-dotted i or un-crossed t when there are journalism majors involved seems a waste of time.
Having custom build gen-cars seems to be the most expensive way to go here. Almost assuring this will never be built.
Too many gen-sets, too high maintenance.
A standard gondola car or takonite car [staticflickr.com] (short heavy cars lots of wheels per length) with a heavy load connected to a very few gen-cars or cable-pull loop would be a lot less maintenance. You could then afford to stock pile an almost unlimited number of cars on the up-hill side if you have space.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:28PM (4 children)
Almost there. The questions should be:
1. what's the delta-H for each car?
2. what's the mass of the car
3. how many cars
1 metric tonne car for 100m delta-H will have 981kJ of potential grav energy.
Potentially, add these:
4. what's the rolling resistance
5. how long is the track
6. what's the efficiency of the electromechanical drive/generator
and with those one can compute the efficiency of the energy storage. With good engineering, I guess we can see an efficiency of about 80-85%.
The "how fast it is allowed to roll" gives info of max power.
I didn't intend to argue - just to point to takyon he was gratuitously dismissive on this occasion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:48PM (3 children)
80% seems way high to me. Maybe 80% storage and 80% extraction, so 64%, and I think that's optimistic.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:18PM (2 children)
Back of the envelope time, a mechanical HP is about one electrical KW (to one sig fig) and a Big Boy 4-8-8-4 which is one hell of a steam locomotive, exerted about six kilo-HP to haul three kilotons (of coal, not a-bombs) over the Wasatch mountain range. So six megawatts will haul a hell of a large and heavy, yet commercially manageable and maintainable train around relatively normal ish looking tracks and coal cars. I don't think it really reasonable for this crazy gadgetry to vastly exceed that general mechanical performance of "tossing around trains at sane speeds and masses using about 10 MW continuous"
So figuring this gadget the dude is building is of similar Rube Goldberg machine status to a 4-8-8-4 steam engine, I figure the "buncha gigawatts" refers to one train of about 10 MW power flinging a large but not ridiculous train load of ballast around for "hundreds of seconds" which at 4-8-8-4 speeds would imply a track in the single digits of miles long for a total energy storage (or expenditure) of single digit gigawatt-seconds. Build a track 100 miles long and make it steeper and maybe some parallel multiple tracks and yeah sure "gigawatt hours" of energy, sure, very hand wavy.
Of course a beowulf cluster of 4-8-8-4 steam engines on an arbitrary number of parallel tracks would be impressive and both power and energy scale linearly with the number of steam locomotives. Given they weigh a million pounds each I would imagine moving a couple hundred in precise concert might generate interesting (measurable?) gravitational waves, up close anyway. I bet it would generate some seismic activity, at least.
And of course building a cluster of a thousand 4-8-8-4 steam engines would require more energy to refine all the steel and build all that equipment than the system would ever store and provide over its lifetime. The "couple amp-hour" battery in my phablet, charged and discharged 1000 times before the battery dies (or explodes?) is a remarkably small equivalent of gasoline (although I forget the exact amount) and the energy cost of building and delivering my cell phone battery likely exceeds that. To some extent potential energy storage is kinda like "hydrogen fuel" its not a source of energy and its not a very good store of energy given the energy required to make it.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:58PM (1 child)
Cog and rack railway is the way rather than normal tracks that can't handle much of a grade at all. Though, it will not relieve one of the issues of motor power.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:15AM
Hmm I know there were geared cog steam engines but Shay engines were not cogged, only geared... pretty much, I think ... I'm so over the high tech imagery of this probably scam "invention" but I like the image of implementing it all with steam locomotives and commercial instant electric hot water heaters as boilers for the sheer spectacle of it. Imagine a thundering herd of 4-8-8-4 Big Boy locos brought back to life hauling Sisyphus sized car loads of granite up a hill only to spin gears on an alternator on the way down. I mean, if its not going to make sense and not going to work as a system, at least look cool as heck while not working.
Some kind of sci fi book plot steam punk fever dream.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Snow on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
Everyone is free (and encouraged!) to submit their own stories.
Be the change you want to see!
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:29PM
Ahem... yes... may I begin? Good. So...
"It was a dark and stormy night"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:06PM (5 children)
You mean, how much energy it stores, right?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:30PM (3 children)
I love watching the semantics bite the semanticist!
That's why I never correct others' speeling errors.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:05PM (2 children)
Muphry's law [wikipedia.org] bites all asses sooner or later.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)
"If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."
Nope! If you can withstand the urge to correct people then you are safe.
Thanks for sharing btw
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:15PM
Nope. All statements of the form "If [FALSE] then [X]" are logically true. If you withstand the urge to correct people, then their statement fits that form.
Now, lets see who can find the fault in what I have written. Or have I managed to prove them wrong?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:53PM
Energy is the potential to do work, power is the doing of work. What actually enters the storage is the doing of work, and as it as stored it becomes future potential work, and when it's released, it's released again as work. So what's being stored is power, in the form of energy.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:19PM (2 children)
Because many journalists, and tech site story submitters, and tech site editors are bad at measurement, especially in the areas of idiotic and variable units of measure (elephants, school buses, double-spaced typewritten pages, Libraries of Congress) and of measuring using units of measurement suitable to the measurement (as in this case).
Even worse is that lots of people assume that if an idiotic or non-applicable unit of measurement is used, that a "you know what I mean" get-out-of-science-jail-free card should apply, even if no one knows what was meant, not even the one originally doing the measuring or reporting.
Add onto that the situation that even facts, such as the things being measured, don't much matter anymore to many people.
It's a self-propagating cycle so bad it could make the Kessel run in less than fourteen parsecs.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:48PM
Dump idiotic journalists?
/dev/null ?
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday July 05 2018, @08:32PM
If we used typewriting monkeys as ballast, how many complete works of Shakespeare could we generate, and could we convert them to Libraries of Congress?
(Score: 3, Funny) by bitstream on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:20PM
1.21 gigawatts?! [youtube.com] [video]
Journalists are exempt from physics. Didn't you know? ;-)
From truth as well :p
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:15PM
I didn't RTFA, but I did read abut this system at least 10 years ago. A little surprised to see it is still around.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:09PM
AC is ignorant of the difference between science, physics, and basic units of measure.
Yes, lots of people get the units of measure wrong when talking about Watts vs Watt-hours.
Bitch if you like, but don't expect it to improve.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:19PM (1 child)
Anyone have an idea what happened to the first one in Nevada? They have a nice page about it on their site https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/about-ares-north-america, [aresnorthamerica.com] and say construction should take 9 months starting a year ago. But it's not in google's satellite imagery at all: https://goo.gl/maps/eg3U3eiKSC12 [goo.gl]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:09PM
Nine months expected construction time? It's clear what that means …
Probably she just had migraine.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:36PM (1 child)
https://www.tumblr.com/search/gravy%20gif [tumblr.com]
Don't click it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:47PM
Ah you got a typo in there
Try
https://www.tumblr.com/search/never+gonna+give+you+up+gif [tumblr.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by xorsyst on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:40PM (13 children)
How is this any better/simpler/cheaper/more environmentally friendly than using pumped water storage, which has been used for decades?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:52PM (2 children)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Sulla on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:01PM (1 child)
Yeah but this one has trains. Checkmate
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:49PM
Meh, with some pumped storage schemes you get to drive inside a mountain on the public tours! [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:52PM
Probably, just probably, useful where water is not abundant. Like, say, Mars. Provided you still have enough steel to make the trains.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:16PM (3 children)
Why bother with water storage and pipes? How about a big pressure vessel? Just use the excess (solar, hydro etc.) production to pump air into pressure container, then release it through a turbine to generate power. Truckers have long stored compressed air to start their diesel engines. Companies are already building large pressure tanks to transport compressed natural gas. Pressure pumps, turbine engines, and generators are off the shelf stuff.
There ya go...the first billion dollar idea is free, the next ones will cost you.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:26PM
Sometimes [thelocal.es], it's because the storage is provided by nature itself, in the form of natural bodies of water separated in elevation, which, when combined with pipes, pumps, and turbines, is arguably simpler (and more failsafe) than using trains or pressure vessels.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:42PM (1 child)
You know what happens when you compress a gas? Yes, it heats up.
And if you maintain the pressure constant, that heat dissipates. Like, it's lost, man, gone.
And when you decompress the gas, you'l be missing that energy.
True, you can use the idea, but for high volume and small delta-pressure - this way, the amount of energy gone by thermal transfer is less a fraction of the total stored energy. Or invent a perfect thermal insulator - with the today's technology, you get around a 700% efficiency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:34PM
Make that efficiency to 70%.
When taking the conversions electricity->pressure->electricity, you get about half what you've put in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:36PM
How is this any better/simpler/cheaper/more environmentally friendly than using pumped water storage, which has been used for decades?
Because they're in a desert?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:11PM
Locomotives don't evaporate.
I'm wondering whether they have surplus electric locomotives, or some aversion to using a cable-drum to winch weighted train cars up the hill?
How about this: use an electric train to haul tanker cars up the hill, world's least efficient pipeline.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:22PM
It's useful in areas where water is scarce? Or where geologic concerns make storing large quantities of elevated water difficult or dangerous? Or if you have low slopes so that any substantial elevation change requires a dramatic horizontal displacement, then there's also the possibility that rolling resistance will be considerably lower than the flowing resistance in pipes.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:46AM (1 child)
I'm a builder -- I built a whole city. And I'm a big environmentalist, I've won many awards for environmental. So I know a lot about these things. And for the pumped you need two lakes. A lake on top of a mountain. And a lake at the bottom. And the water goes back and forth. Back and forth. It's not great for fishing. It's not great for swimming. And it's not great for boating. You're at the lake, right? Up on the mountain. And you're on your little boat. You're fishing. And your kids are taking a swim. Beautiful day, the sun is shining. Then, a cloud comes. And suddenly, no water! Boat stranded in mud, kids & fish flopping around in the mud. Where did the water go? It's at the bottom of the mountain, in the other lake. And the folks that were wading down there, well, they better be good swimmers. Because that one got a lot deeper all of a sudden! With the pumped, you take what possibly were two beautiful lakes. PERFECTO. And you make them very very ugly. And if you didn't have the two lakes, very expensive. Because you need two lakes. The two water features. So if you started with one lake, you're building a lake. Or if you start with ZERO lakes you're building two lakes. And a lot of mountains don't come with a lake at the top. A lot of mountains have a pointy tip. But you want a hollow. So maybe you do a sex change for the mountain. Turning a boy mountain into a girl mountain. And that costs big money. If you have nuclear, it's less money. It gets the job done. But it brings out the alt-left. The "hell no, we won't glow" folks. And it makes a lot of fallout. And a lot of noise. Trust me, you can count on getting sued so many times. Before, during & after.
Believe me, it's no way to build an Energy Grid. What we need is RELIABLE power. Coal and nuclear. We need to make our coal & nuclear profitable. So many are closing. But we need them badly. We can do a subsidy. Or we can do a law where folks have to buy the coal power. And the nuclear power. For our National Security!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @02:03AM
Build a wall around D.C. and Mar-a-Lago and use them for pumped water storage.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:43PM (2 children)
The manufacturing / embedded energy in a railyard built up the side of a mountain is likely to be immense.
Also I'm not sure given present bearing technology if the embedded energy in a set of train bearings will be less than the lifetime storage of this gadget.
Lets optimize this a bit. Instead of solids lets leverage our knowledge of liquids and use a nice dense liquid thats cheap and mostly safe. I was going to suggest liq mercury but how about Dihydrogen Monoxide? Its mostly safe although consuming too much will kill people and its an inhalation hazard.
So instead of putting the liq H2O in tank cars, F it, lets use pipes. And instead of a goofy railyard lets use a pale imitation of the God Emperors Big Beautiful Wall to hold back the pressure.
There's another interesting optimization which is to locate this gadget in areas of naturally high concentration. In fact we can leverage and synergy the local biological systems by relying on natural condensation of the Dihydrogen Monoxide to accumulate behind the Big Beautiful Wall.
Somehow, this upgrade of the gravity train using wall / pipes / dihydrogen monoxide working fluid reminds me of something I've seen before, but I'm not sure what.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:45PM (1 child)
Well Sheeeeiiiiiiii....
Great minds thinking alike and all that.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:55PM
Because building a large watertight containment area is free.. Nice to know.
Just perhaps different situations call for different solutions?
Although this one is poorly designed. You would use more dumb weight cars.
And to the people comparing scale to dams.. This is competition to a tesla battery farm, not the hoover dam. Sigh.
Still.. Badly designed
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
The only place where it may not be a stupid idea could be next to the Ivanpah plant [wikipedia.org].
Because it's a mountainous desert. With a lot of space. And no water for the much better pumped storage solution.
But even then, it's still the desert: nowhere near the consumer. Who doesn't want this silly multi-mile solution next to his place.
And the power numbers are silly.
You know what I would spend a few tens millions doing, if I had to invest them in energy storage?
Take a crumbling factory near a downtown. Pour a nice deep foundation, and put a strong tall steel structure above it, with some elegant exterior. Then attach motor/generators to as much weight(s) as the structure can handle, and raise and lower them based on instant electricity demand.
It would take no more materials than the train tracks, work anywhere where enough of a downtown makes the tall building inconspicuous (and means that the ground isn't terrible), be near the consumer... Hell, I'll call it the Church of the Smarter Storage, so I don't have to pay property taxes !
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:05PM
And when the weights reach the top (or bottom), have a large bird come out of a window and chirp several times!
(Score: 4, Informative) by bitstream on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:08PM (3 children)
Let's take a example like the Coo-Trois-Ponts Hydroelectric Power Station [wikipedia.org] in Belgium. The data for this station is:
Effective water volume: 8 450 000 m³
Effective hydraulic head: 275 m
Thus it can hold 2.28e13 J (22.8 terrajoules)
Decently heavy train [wikipedia.org]: 3000 ton (3e6 kg)
So it would take 2815 big trains barked up along a 275 meter steep to get the same energy capacity. Not to mention all complexity and manufacturing pollutants.
Another eye opener, a normal laptop battery ~173 kJ (48 Wh) equals 2 cubic meters of water falling down 9 meters (69 cubic feet falling 30 feet).
Conclusion: They are barking up the wrong gravity rails ;-) ..or someone is looking to get some cash.
(who pays? who benefits?)
Gravity storage seems attractive superficially until you do the physics. Better to get started on liquid nuclear reactors, flow batteries etc. Get some He3 from the moon for research etc.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity [wikipedia.org]
List of pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:29PM
There's an easier hand wavy engineering argument that its difficult to get a straight answer because I'm sure it varies a lot, but very hand wavy Hoover Dam squirts ten million pounds of water per second, so a mechanical contrivance that continuously flung a million pounds of "not water" thru similar "engineering sane and reasonable" distances, would generate about a tenth of a hoover dam.
So if you're impressed with Hoover Dam as a mechanical engineering achievement, and impressed with things that move about that weigh a million pounds (like very large train engines) to handle similar amounts of power using pulleys and baling wire and duct tape takes either something ten times bigger or ten times heavier than "already fairly impressive existing upper limit". In other words without substantial evidence to the contrary it aint happening.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by dmanny on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:00PM (1 child)
Of course rolling stock costs more than water, pound for pound.
The Wikipedia list misses some facilities by having a threshold of 1000MW.
I remember when this operation failed. The story today made me look into the current status, it appears to be online. It operates at a head of approximately 850 foot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_Station [wikipedia.org]
I also found the WP list of hydroelectric failures interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures [wikipedia.org]
But your point is clear. That is a lot of trains, 2815. Making them each have 3e6 kg mass would be nearly impossible. Water in a reservoir stacks much nicer than trains. The energy efficiency is one thing, the maintenance costs for that much rolling stock would be prohibitive.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bitstream on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:52PM
In Australia, BHP in June 2001 had a trial with 682 ore cars and eight distributed GE AC6000CW locomotives with a total weight of 99 734 tons (99e6 kg). So just 85 train sets, but there are other complications like having to use a cog railway, wires with metal fatigue, wear, oil, sand etc. So I'll suspect the investment and maintenance will make it unfeasible.
If one could use magnetic energy storage. It may be way more efficient.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:00PM (2 children)
Didn't CSX patent this a few years ago? Pretty sure I read that...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:17PM (1 child)
No it was Sisyphus.
(Score: 3, Touché) by MostCynical on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:07AM
Nàh, that's prior art.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:37PM
The normal way of doing it, though is a lot more flexible and efficient. You pump water uphill to store energy as potential energy, and the run it through a turbine to extract that energy. The storage is a lot more flexible and reusable, and you can even raise fish in it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:41PM (2 children)
Why use a train on a slope rather than just pulling the weight directly upward with a winch?
- Much less land needed
- Motor/generator no longer on a mobile platform (with all the issues that entails)
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Wednesday July 04 2018, @05:20AM (1 child)
I didn't read TFA, but I'm guessing that a train on a slope might be a good niche solution for the side of a mountain in a remote area (where building a damn is not a reasonable option).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @10:20AM
Even in that case, having a fixed motor uphill drawing a mass up along the rails would be a better idea.