Deep Abandoned Mine In Finland To Be Turned Into a Giant Gravity Battery (iflscience.com) 131
James Felton reports via IFL Science: One of the deepest metal mines in Europe -- the Pyhasalmi Mine in central Finland -- is to be turned into an enormous gravity battery capable of storing 2 megawatts of energy. [...] Despite the cool name, the idea behind gravity batteries is really simple. During times when energy sources are producing more energy than the demand, the excess energy is used to move weights (in the form of water or sometimes sand) upwards, turning it into potential energy. When the power supply is low, these objects can then be released, powering turbines as our good friend (and deadly enemy) gravity sends them towards the Earth.
Though generally gravity batteries take the form of reservoirs, abandoned mines moving sand or other weights up when excess power is being produced have also been suggested. Scottish company Gravitricity created a system of winches and hoists that can be installed in such disused mineshafts. The company will install the system in the 1,400-meter-deep (4,600 feet) zinc and copper mine in Pyhajarvi, Finland. "A study last year by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) estimated that gravity batteries in abandoned underground mines could store up to 70TWh of energy -- enough to meet global electricity demands," reports The Independent. "The repurposed mines could also provide economic benefits to the communities that previously relied on the mine for their livelihoods."
Though generally gravity batteries take the form of reservoirs, abandoned mines moving sand or other weights up when excess power is being produced have also been suggested. Scottish company Gravitricity created a system of winches and hoists that can be installed in such disused mineshafts. The company will install the system in the 1,400-meter-deep (4,600 feet) zinc and copper mine in Pyhajarvi, Finland. "A study last year by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) estimated that gravity batteries in abandoned underground mines could store up to 70TWh of energy -- enough to meet global electricity demands," reports The Independent. "The repurposed mines could also provide economic benefits to the communities that previously relied on the mine for their livelihoods."
Two megawhats? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't find the actual answer, it doesn't even say on their corporate website. I would guess 2 MWh, it's only a demonstrator.
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Then again, could be only 2MJoules (or .00000055 MWh) !
Re: Two megawhats? (Score:1)
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LOL! nice! so same as 0.0000584 liter of gasoline then! 1MWh ~= 105 liters of gasoline (28 US gallons) ?
Even 2MWh is only about 50 US gallons of gasoline. So maximum ~50 gallons worth of gasoline at best? I have an old 50 gallon drum which I am willing to give them for free.
Wait, wait, you're getting that all wrong. How may football fields is it? That's apparently the only unit Americans understand.
That's not entirely true. We also understand elephants and blue whales, which is weird because there aren't that many elephants in North America any more and most people have never seen a blue whale.
Re: Two megawhats? (Score:2)
I don't know where the number was pulled from, but the original plan was to have 75MW power production capacity, and storage capacity of 530 MWh. Which is not too bad considering that Finland has about 14 GW peak energy consumption, and hydroelectric capacity peaks at about 1.2 GW. It is also not a game changer alone, but it would help to collect wind energy during the night times and also even out the morning and 5-to-7 PM peaks in power usage.
The plant has been planned for a couple of years now, and it wa
Re:Two megawhats? (Score:5, Informative)
Sad that none of the tech journalists that copy-pasted this story on all the sites I just looked through, asked the same question. However from a blog post on Gravitricity's web site, it mentions "...you have to drop 500 tonnes around 800 metres to generate 1MWh". Here we have a 1400m shaft, so dropping a 500 tonne weight down that would be 1.75mWh. A weight of a little over 500 tonnes doesn't seem infeasible, so 2MWh is probably right.
Re:Two megawhats? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tech journalists are nothing more than journalists writing about tech. They largely are clueless as to what they are actually writing about. What is really sad is I've seen engineers make this mistake.
Though I'll ask the question, just how many Casio watches and how long can you power them with only 1.75mWh ;-)
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MWh or mWh?
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MWh or mWh?
Welcome to my point.
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That's no excuse - everyone who finished high school should have learnt science basics
Sorry but horseshit. Science isn't even a mandatory subject in most countries and when it is it attempts to cover all fields of science in a laughably tiny timespan. The amount of effort given to tech students the difference between power and energy is likely a week at the most.
Even a glance at your electrical bill would show you the correct units to use for energy.
Most people never read their consumption unless their is something wrong with dollar figure, and even then they look at the numbers and neither give a shit nor comprehend the meaning of the units behind them.
If you are a journalist reporting in that sector, it's your responsibility to at least refresh your knowledge of such basic concepts, or you are failing as a journalist to convey information accurately.
That I actually agree wit
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Usually if one says he has stored X MWh, then that means he can produce that X MWh.
What do you care how much loss he has?
If you attack a solar plant to my grid, I want to know what is the peak power and at what time of the day. I do not care if your panels are 18% effective or 24% effective.
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What do you care how much loss he has?
Because the energy you put in has costs and these have to be covered somehow.
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We want to know, because if the "business" cannot recoup their costs will fail, and therefore cannot plausibly be sold as a "battery", which the TFS is trying to do.
So, costs of storage are an important metric, especially for a pilot or a prototype that claims it can smooth out short-term supply-demand imbalances.
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You seem to have missed that they can buy electricity when generation is in surplus in order to hoist the giant pile of mass up the mine shaft, and then sell it back in time of scarcity when spot prices are higher.
Nobody cares about how much loss there is in the system, as long as the delta between buy and sell prices is higher than the losses to heat and overcoming friction. The grid operator gets to keep some level of baseline generation running rather than idling, and gets to not run expensive peaker ge
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LOL. If efficiency of storage does not matter, why would they need to "minimize the losses"?
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if you buy at $0.26 and sell at $0.043 you need a lot more then 100% effiency to make money.
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It isn't obvious at all, if the losses are large, dimwit.
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Sad that none of the tech journalists that copy-pasted this story on all the sites I just looked through, asked the same question. However from a blog post on Gravitricity's web site, it mentions "...you have to drop 500 tonnes around 800 metres to generate 1MWh". Here we have a 1400m shaft, so dropping a 500 tonne weight down that would be 1.75mWh. A weight of a little over 500 tonnes doesn't seem infeasible, so 2MWh is probably right.
The article says the mine is 1444 meters deep but the shaft they are using for a "full scale test" is 530 meters. There may not be a single shaft that descends to the full 1444 meters depth
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I auto-corrected it to two mega-joules. Was not impressed.
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These types of articles lose all their credibility when they can't even express their key datapoint in an appropriate unit measure, i.e. MW is a measure of power, not energy.
Aaaargh! (Score:3)
Two megawatts of energy Doesn't anyone proofread this kind of thing?
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No one with any STEM knowledge, evidently. But there are a lot of such people in "the West".
Does anyone posting a story on Slashdot (Score:2)
proofread two megawatts of energy?
They made Kessel run in 2 megawatts. (Score:2)
In their case, if they round up
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You've been around *how* long, and you're still asking this? :)
hawk
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Clearly should be jigawatts.
A timeless classic (Score:4, Funny)
Net (Score:2)
Wouldn't such systems store so little energy that it would be far more cost efficient to just buy more energy than to build?
I mean, it's a cool little project, but there are opportunity costs too...
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Our office is in a very tall building and there is a version of this in all the elevators, the legend is it does save power.
Project has been abandoned (Score:5, Interesting)
The news here in Finland was that the project was already abandoned back in November: https://www.epv.fi/en/project/... [www.epv.fi]
Re:Project has been abandoned (Score:4, Informative)
That's for the pumped-storage hydro plant.
This is a sand (or other solid) based solution: https://im-mining.com/2024/02/... [im-mining.com]
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see, it works! It successfully stored that information for three months!
In the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
We have been thinking of using old mines as geo-thermal powerstations as they typically fill with water and naturally get quite warm so that heat can be reused if we transfer it with a simple pipe and pumed water.
Also, the article says 70TWh of energy meets global demand?
I think that is way underestimated:
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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We have been thinking of using old mines as geo-thermal powerstations as they typically fill with water and naturally get quite warm so that heat can be reused if we transfer it with a simple pipe and pumed water.
That's actually quite a bad idea. Mines by their nature do not generate a considerable amount of energy in the form of heat. The proposal is far more expensive and energy intensive than simply drilling deep wells which could be injected also provide thermal power. Additionally you need a *LOT* of heat to make any meaningful conversion to electricity so none of these existing mines or proposed wells are actually suitable for geothermal power stations. New wells are however being looked at to provide district
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Woopse forgot a second set of quote tags.
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Well, I'll defer to your superior understanding form wherever you are, but as a geologist within an hour's drive of several of the proposed schemes, I think it's a reasonably good idea.
I've also got a pretty good idea (from having done it well over 100 times) of the effort (and working space, and paperwork) involved in drilling a "mere" 2.5km deep well. I wouldn't wish the NIMBYs on a
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> Additionally you need a *LOT* of heat to make any meaningful conversion to electricity
Did I say it was being convereted to electricity?
I think it's more for domestic heating, heat pumps basically.
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The original article doesn't actually say that it meets global demand: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073... [mdpi.com]
Just that "UGES is a particularly interesting technology for long-term energy storage to reduce seasonal fluctuations in electricity demand and wind and solar generation.".
70TWh (Score:2)
The statisa link indicates that net electricity consumption worldwide was 25,530 TWh for 2022
It just so happens that 25,530TWh/70TWh=364.71
Which is too close to the number of days in a year to be a coincidence.
So given that this is about energy storage I think they mean that 70TWh is enough to store/supply 1 day's worth of global electricity demand.
The article actually states that "The technology is estimated to have a global potential of 7 to 70 TWh".
So it seems that The Independent writer(Anthony Cuthbert
Damit, learn basic Physics! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Megawatt" is not a unit of energy.
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neither of which has units of megawatt
The company themselves say 2 MW (Score:4, Informative)
This is very confusing, the company themselves delivering the technology tweeted (https://twitter.com/CallioPyhajarvi/status/1754375348131676283):
> Plans unveiled to convert Europe's deepest zinc and copper mine into 2MW gravity energy plant.
This makes little sense, so it's not a battery, it's an energy plant? Making 2MW of continuous power out of... what? They link to an article for more information (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24094926.gravitricity-demonstrate-energy-storage-tech-deep-mine/):
> It added that the scheme being developed would deliver up to two megawatts of storage capacity, declaring: “This would tie straight into the local electricity grid and provide balancing services to the Finnish network.”
So it IS a battery after all? With... "two megawatts of storage capacity" - which is nonsensical of course. Maybe it's connection can deliver up to 2MW of power when needed, but, still, WHAT'S THE ACTUAL CAPACITY?
Maybe they have no idea themselves? Doesn't seem like a serious outfit...
Re: The company themselves say 2 MW (Score:1)
When fully charged it is supposed to deliver 2MWh before it is empty. It then takes 2MWh*loss factor to recharge.
2MWh is not very much but about all you can do in a mine shaft despite its depth, gravity is a weak force.
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I wonder about swirling around toxic runoff, and how much of the water would leak out -- and how much energy lost to the pumps.
Competition with Batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
2MWh of Li-ion battery capacity will set you back about $300k. Even if they massively scale up production I don't see them being able to acquire an abandoned mine and install an apparatus capable of dropping hundreds of tons of counterweight down a shaft for that kind of money.
Nifty idea, but I expect the economics will kill them (if they haven't already, based on comments from other posters).
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Completely agree. Scalability is a massive concern as well. It's much, much easier to plop another 2MWh of battery into the middle of some empty field that is presumably already allocated to the purpose than it is to find another mine shaft and install some bespoke piece of kit.
And then can you even maintain the things? Imagine sending engineers all over the hinterlands to your collection of mineshafts, as opposed to having a team permanently stationed at said empty field containing batteries offering th
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Such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
?
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Such a shame ... (Score:3)
to see the reserves from any storage project dwindle fast because of cryptocurrency and AI use.
Sounds Familiar (Score:5, Informative)
Back in 2016 I heard about the same thing being done with trains [vox.com].
The company's website is still around but their news section hasn't been updated since 2020 [aresnorthamerica.com], I'm guessing dropping battery prices killed their economics. And given the efficiency of trains it's hard to see the mine shaft as being much more efficient.
And on the topic of gravity storage how is it that none of these companies are using the most obvious startup name possible [wikipedia.org].
Rail roads on grand canyon? (Score:2)
Reality check (Score:5, Interesting)
Gravity batteries using solids and pulleys and cranes seem to have become the new perpetual motion engines. We know from underlying physics that they would be utterly awful (material costs, friction losses, durability), but there's money on the table, so there are people to take it.
Gravity batteries that could be made to work are made with liquids, not solids. Same reason why when you ship huge amounts of freight, you don't do it via truck or rail, you do it via barge or ship. Friction losses compound rapidly, as do durability issues (many of which are friction related) as mass of the object being moved around increases. Flowing through a lubricant is energetically cheap. Wheeling solid things on top of one another is much more energetically expensive.
So since people selling these modern day perpetual motion engines know they're selling you something that won't work at any meaningful scale, their promotional materials aren't written as technical descriptions used to promote them to civil engineers so the tech becomes popular. They're written for layman activists to promote them to other laymen.
In case you doubt this, here's this company's promotional video from recent past. Yes, like all modern scammers in this field, they were crowdfunding much of their modern day perpetual motion engines until they get big enough for government level subsidies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And for those wondering why the mine isn't being used to liquid gravity battery. That was the original plan. Problem is that groundwater penetrated into the mine and started flooding parts of it, making these plans unfeasible.
This is an article about the plans from our local former engineering magazine that used to be sent to all members of Engineer Union until a few years ago after quality crashed as it was less and less engineers writing for engineers and more and more humanist babble with not a shred of understanding of engineering pretending to be an engineering magazine.
https://www.tekniikkatalous.fi... [tekniikkatalous.fi]
It notably also doesn't tell us how much energy they actually plan to be able to store citing the same "energy equals mass times speed^2, not mass times speed^2 per time^2, because I'm totally an engineer writing for formerly engineering magazine that is now another humanist rag written by people who barely scraped by through lyceum's physics course". Reading it reminded me once again why it's not longer one of the perks of membership of Engineering Union to get this formerly excellent piece of news media.
Re: Reality check (Score:3, Insightful)
I think there's interest in gravity (and other large) battery systems despite pretty high inefficiencies, because they pair well with wind and solar generation which need stored energy when they're not generating, and which don't dial down when demand falls, like a gas plant. So you're throwing energy away during the day and importing it at high cost at night. Even a relatively inefficient battery can help with that situation.
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They are not highly inefficient. How do you come to such an stupid idea?
Pumped storage is far over 80%
And this will be the same.
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If you have the water available. And a suitable site. Gravity batteries can be made to work with rocks. Which are plentiful world-wide. Abandoned mine shafts have few other uses, so where they exist, there is little competition for their use.
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Ship the water in and you only have to replace eveperation losses.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
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You know what else German government said?
That they can run the country on wind and solar. And that they can shut all the coal down because of it.
See, this is the difference between being a cat progressive and someone who lives in a reality. You quote aspirational speeches and stories on websites. I just reference reality, where Germans closed down their sole major pumped hydro station because they were shutting down coal in favour of wind and solar and daily prices of electricity went from stable to unstab
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Would that be the
- Goldisthal Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
- Langenprozelten Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
- Markersbach Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
- Waldeck Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That was the German's sole pumped hydro station?
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Last two of which only one is major. If you read the commentary that actually made it through wikipedia censors, you'll find out why.
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https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/g... [anu.edu.au]
3000GWh per million people globaly compared with 20GWh required
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Amazing. Truly amazing. These are truly wonderful, downright utopian looking castles in the clouds.
How many exist in reality?
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Gravity batteries that could be made to work are made with liquids, not solids.
Like pumped storage hydropower (PSH)?
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Just out of curiosity, would it make more sense to recondition old oil platforms for a gravity battery? Then you wouldn't really need to spend so much energy lifting the load, you could just inflate some sacks and float it it back up, then let it drop back down to create the energy.
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The inflation would have to overcome the pressure, which is the weight of the water column on top of the payload. The deeper you go, the more water you need to "lift" to inflate the sacks.
I'm not sure if that math would add up, but it certainly is an interesting idea.
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The water would seriously reduce your gains.
1. You'd need to subtract the mass of the displaced water from the weight of your dropping mass, which would mean you need a much, much, heavier load to get useful power.
2. If you drop at any real rate of speed, you'd need to account for power loss from the drag of the water - much like air resistance is the main energy cost for cars at any real speeds. And water drag is a real pain. It's why ships have been "streamlined" for ages. This would be straight up l
...my iphone... (Score:2)
More the more the more the (Score:4, Informative)
If Thunderfoot is too acerbic for you, here's another one https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The last link is a duplicate of second one.
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The last link is a duplicate of second one.
Sorry about that - a copypasta error.
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Buy artesian original pasta, not knock-off pirated pasta. (Yes, I know [wikipedia.org].)
Does anyone else here remember spinach pasta in the form of little wagon wheels?
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Specifically spinach pasta, I'm not sure about. But you can get "tricolore" pasta here in yellow (natural), green and reddish-orange (I'd have to take my colour reference chart book to the supermarket to be more accurate) at the local Lidl - and possibly other stores too. But Lidl has a reputation for slightly off-normal continental (i.e. Europe mainland) products, and this is sufficiently oddball to fit in. I haven't noticed it anywhere else, but I can't say I look too closely at pasta - it's a filler material.
I assumed the "reddish" pasta was just a dye, but it might be ... paprika, perhaps? I'm sufficiently interested now to RTFpackage.
Oh, shape : circular extrusions with about 6 radial ribs from the centre ; about 2cm diameter by half a cm extrusion length.
Is that the stuff you're thinking of?
Here in the States, we have spinach, sun dried tomato, and of course standard semolina pasta, respectively green, reddish, and blond. Oh, and whole wheat (abomination!) and gluten free. Seriously, it's sad that whole wheat pasta exists, the texture is terrible.
The little wheels are about as you describe - maybe 5 spokes instead of six.. The Italian part of my heritage also has a lot of different shapes in use, which depends on what sauce is going with the pasta. Only us Italians can make a whole galaxy o
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I can't say I've *ever* looked at the flour type for a pasta. Why i
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If I cared enough, I'd check my suspicion that pasta was invented in "China" (+/-) and imported to Italy by that Marco Columbus guy. But I'm one of those "it all comes out the same" people when it comes to cooking - very much a user level user. Forever having to separate the incinerated bits from the bits with some residual nutritional value, because I tend to do something interesting while I'm cooking, and forget about whatever is cooking.
I can't say I've *ever* looked at the flour type for a pasta. Why is whole wheat such an abomination? Is that a universal opinion (in cookery? Impossible!), or a personal preference.
Isn't "durum" a breed of wheat?
Whole wheat noodles have a weird texture, at least to me. Taste is okay, but part of the fun of eating pasta is the texture. I even got a few "knock it off's" when I'd play with my spiral noodles as a kid. Whole wheat noodles just feel bumpy and creepy, like regular noodles with a bad case of acne.
The wheat type is durum wheat. The flour depends on what part of the grain it is made from. Durum flour comes from the endosperm of the grain, and semolina flour from the whole grain. Durum flour is great in br
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Reminds me of when I discovered "tofu" in the health-foods store (the only one in a city of a quarter million people) after I turned vegan. Weird texture (because it was dried, then rehydrated as I cooked it), but I could read the composition data and knew I needed to cover the protein requirements of my diet, and I came to like it. I've never taken to "fresh" tofu since that became available.
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Reminds me of when I discovered "tofu" in the health-foods store (the only one in a city of a quarter million people) after I turned vegan. Weird texture (because it was dried, then rehydrated as I cooked it), but I could read the composition data and knew I needed to cover the protein requirements of my diet, and I came to like it. I've never taken to "fresh" tofu since that became available.
Ah - have you ever had the so-called "stinky tofu"? It's fermented, although there might be something else going on for it to smell so bad they gave it that name.
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Not long term economic positive (Score:2)
Projects like this only bring in positive economics during construction, after that the maintenance is minimal and the expertise is usually brought in for short term projects. There's no local economic impact on an ongoing basis.
Profit sharing is possible, but doesn't usually benefit individuals in the area.
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Projects like this only bring in positive economics during construction, after that the maintenance is minimal and the expertise is usually brought in for short term projects. There's no local economic impact on an ongoing basis.
Yes that's true of a lot of project and it sounds like you're framing it as a bad thing.
This kind of thinking is pervasive in so many renewable energy projects to convince the public that it's good, i.e. they create jobs on an ongoing basis. This is a more polite way of saying it needs more maintenance and has high ongoing costs.
If you had a handful of competing forms of renewable energy, would you prefer to pay for the more expensive less reliable one just because it employs more people? Do you make the s
Pico-Second (Score:1)
Word crimes (Score:2)
Battery is more than one of something. So it's a gravity cell or a gravity capacitor, isn't it?
The semantics portion of my brain is in re-"volt". Sorry. Had to.
Gravity batteries are not that great (Score:2)
Considering this is a very deep mine (Score:2)
178 kiloton (Score:2)
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178 * 1000 metric tons / 1 metric ton * 14 * .272kwh in GWh = 0.67GWh
(I think 1 ton droped 100m is equivelent to .272kwh)
There are laws (Score:2)
Three of them, in fact.
Re-Reinventing the Wheel (Score:2)
When we do it with water, it's called "pumped storage hydropower" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and it's been around for a LONG time. I can't imagine that doing it with sand or rocks would be more efficient or less expensive.