Here’s a new one, at least to me. Oh sure, gravity storage old news, sort of: water falls onto turbine generators and makes electricity. Here’s one that uses solar to lift concrete blocks, which then come back down when electric demand requires it:
China just activated the world’s first commercial mountain gravity energy storage system in Yunnan Province — raising 36 individual 2,000-tonne concrete weights up 600-meter cliff faces using surplus solar electricity, then releasing them to drive generators during peak demand.
The Yunnan Gravity Array uses a rack-and-pinion drive embedded into existing cliff faces, requiring no new earthworks beyond anchor installation. Each weight traveling 600 vertical meters stores 3.3 megawatt-hours. All 36 weights together provide 120 megawatt-hours with 60-megawatt discharge for 2 hours — matching a small gas peaking plant profile.
China identified 12,000 kilometers of suitable cliff terrain across Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou capable of hosting gravity storage systems. At 40 yuan per kilowatt-hour manufacturing cost, mountain gravity storage is the least expensive grid storage technology deployed at commercial scale in China today.
Source: China Three Gorges Corporation, Yunnan Provincial Energy Bureau, Chinese National Development and Reform Commission, 2025
Digital fingerprints left in the file’s data explicitly show that this image was created or heavily altered using artificial intelligence software.
Visual Flaws
While the graphic attempts to look like a real engineering project, looking closely reveals several telltale AI glitches:
Nonsensical Text: The text printed on the blocks says “2000-TONNE”, but the layout, placement, and alignment of the text are digitally warped.
Structural Anomalies: The tracks built onto the cliff do not connect realistically at the top or bottom stations.
Distorted People: The figures standing at the base have warped limbs, lacks realistic details, and feature blended, nonsensical clothing/helmets.
The Real Technology
While the image itself is completely fake, the concept of a gravity battery is a real and rapidly growing form of green technology.
How it works: Surplus clean energy (like daytime solar power) is used to winch massive weights up to a high elevation. When power is needed later, the weights are lowered, spinning a turbine to generate electricity.
Real-world applications: Companies like Energy Vault build actual grid-scale gravity
Potenial energy is potential energy, whether it’s water falling down hill, or a concrete block.
What’s amazing to me is that the construction is cheaper than a gas-fired power plant. I wonder if that’s also true in the US where we lack China’s super-efficient civil construction techniques?
Maybe I’m missing something but I’d think there would be some cables to pull the weights up and lower them down. If they are in/near the tracks this would cantilever the weight from the edge.
And who would build the control station right under a 2000 tonne block landing zone? Why have the control station opened to the air rather than in an enclosed structure a safe distance away with full view of the operation?
This is not a 600 meter cliff. It looks like about 10-15x the height of a person…so maybe 20-30 meters.
In the good old days when locomotives lacked power “inclined planes” very much like those illustrated were used to lift heavy cargo so locomotives could pull on level ground.
They are mechanical and require maintenance. Ice and snow can be a severe problem. And if a cable breaks, look out below. You can find one on display on the river bank in Madison, Indiana.
The main line route Pennsylvania built to compete w the Erie Canal also used them. They were used to lift barges on canals across NJ.
There are also proposals to use electric locomotives to pull heavy cars up the side of a mountain and then recovering electricity on the way down.
On the eastern coast of the Yellow Sea, in the city of Rudong north of Shanghai, the world’s first fully operational commercial gravitational energy storage system is about to come online. At first glance it resembles a brutalist residential tower: a dense concrete structure rising almost forty stories. In reality, it functions as a giant mechanical battery, designed to store electricity generated by renewable sources and release it back into the grid when demand rises.
Although similar projects are being explored in several countries, none has yet reached commercial operation. The technology provider Energy Vault, together with project partners Atlas Renewable Energy and China Tianying Inc., is now close to activating the plant. The system has already passed technical testing, has been connected to China’s electrical grid, and is awaiting the final regulatory approvals before entering service.
In Rudong, the structure stands 148 meters tall and occupies a footprint of roughly 120 by 110 meters. The system has a storage capacity of 100 MWh and can deliver up to 25 MW of power, providing about four hours of electricity at full output.
I agree with your thoughts, but cliffs are usually remote from the grid and harder to do construction because of mountains and lack of roads. The benefits of gravity batteries is best achieved with location near load centers, generation centers and major grid lines.
