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posted by on Saturday December 03 2016, @01:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the ARES-is-a-useful-engine dept.

The easiest way to squirrel away electricity in times of plenty, for use when it is scarce, is to pump water uphill with it. Such pumped storage is widely employed where local geography and hydrology permit, but it does need two basins, at different heights, to act as reservoirs, and a supply of water to fill them.

[...] Where geography does not favour pumped storage, though, the search is on for alternatives. These range from giant batteries, via caverns filled with compressed air, to huge flywheels made of carbon-fibre composites. But one firm looking into the matter eschews all these. It has stuck with the logic of pumped storage, which is to move large amounts of matter up and down hills. The difference is that in its case the matter is solid.

The firm in question calls itself ARES, which stands for Advanced Rail Energy Storage.

[...] The rocks stand in for the water in a pumped-storage system. They are carried up- and downhill by a train that is thus the equivalent of the turbines. The track the train runs on is equivalent to the tunnel. And the motors that drive the train act, like the electrical kit of a pumped-storage turbine, as generators when they run in reverse as the train rolls backwards downhill, pulled by gravity.


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  • (Score: 2) by deadstick on Saturday December 03 2016, @01:57PM

    by deadstick (5110) on Saturday December 03 2016, @01:57PM (#436525)

    Business has been slow there since the Chicken Ranch lost its airstrip.

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