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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.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday December 05 2016, @06:12AM
The heavier the trains, the more power you get. The more tracks you build, the more power you get.
This requires a massive amount of land and a lot of concrete, i.e. a massive amount of water, if only once.
Ant then you gotta maintain your oversized infrastructure, including you giant mobile engine/generators and their catenary/cables. And you get no savings as this is so site-sensitive (and automatically distant from the power users) that it won't scale to more than a few systems, ever.
It's not that it doesn't work, but I wouldn't put my money on it.