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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: 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?