Humans have long built towering structures to showcase the power of empires, rulers, religions and corporations. Today, more tall buildings are popping up than ever before. But skyscrapers could soon have a new purpose: storing renewable energy.
One of the biggest hurdles to a power grid dominated by clean energy is the intermittency of some renewable sources. Sometimes clouds roll in when solar energy is needed, or the wind stops blowing, and turbines can’t generate power. Other times, the sun and wind produce more electricity than is required.
Storage is crucial for balancing generation and consumption. A combination of technologies — from various forms of batteries to other energy storage methods — will likely be necessary to increase capacity.
Enter battery skyscrapers. At the end of May, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the architecture and engineering firm behind some of the world’s tallest buildings, announced a partnership with the energy storage company Energy Vault to develop new gravity energy storage solutions.
That includes a design for a skyscraper that would use a motor powered by electricity from the grid to elevate giant blocks when energy demand is low. These blocks would store the electricity as “potential” energy. When there is demand, the blocks would be lowered, releasing the energy, which would be converted into electricity.
Hard to see how building a skyscraper would be cheaper than pumping water to a storage tank on top of a hill, and then running it through a turbine on the trip down to produce electricity.
Now that’s an idea. They already have elevator shafts you could move a big weight up and down in existing buildings. Maybe be could combine this with high-rise housing for the homeless?
Residential buildings need fewer elevators since office buildings size the number of elevators to meet the morning and evening rush. You could use the excess elevator capacity for the energy storage weights.
I have it on good authority that electricity can be transmitted over considerable distance. It need not be generated within a mile of where it will be used.
These people know how to calculate costs. With a local tall building they do not need to incur the cost of building a expensive Ultra High Votage DC transmission line (like the California Inter-tie) with all the land use permits and they do not incur the transmission losses of 5%.
Of course electricity can be transmitted over long distances. Howeverthey need electric transmission lines to carry it to the city and they incur line losses. So they need to perform calculations on the feasibility.
Um … it’s only STORAGE of power, the power is ALREADY being generated elsewhere. In this case, the power is sent to the big storage building with weights all over it (incurring whatever losses exist from generation location to storage location), and then when needed is moved from the storage location (the big building with weights) to the various places that need to use it at the time. Most likely local to the city where the big building is located.
And in that case, the question still remains. Why not store the excess power closer to where it was generated and then, when needed, release it to the grid to be distributed?
The problem is that skyscrapers are designed to minimize elevator sh@ft space in favor of rentable floor space. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of elevator sh@fts, just that the ratio is nothing like what you’d design to maximize lifting and falling capability.
And you can’t just punch holes through the floors to add sh@fts. The floors are often concrete pours with rebar and are part of the stability of the building.
Maybe there would be a way to move weights horizontally floor by floor and position them so you could use existing elevator sh@fts, but that seems it would add a lot of power-draining and essentially useless to the task weight, and while skyscrapers are stoutly built, I’m not sure they’re ready to carry the kind of weight that the enterprise would require: the lifting and dropping, the generation equipment, and the tracks to move the weights horizontally for storage floor by floor.
Yes, the unredacted word sh@ft is “not allowed” by the nanny.
And so? My expectation is that one would want to punch through as many shafts as there was room for and that maintained structural integrity, so no residents … they need to go to another unused building.
Guys, water is heavy. A mere pint weights about a pound. Retrofitting any sort of existing building to be filled with water is a pipe (sorry) dream, because the structure could never bear the weight.
The whole thing sounds rather impractical to me. Lot’s of wastage - need cables (friction), need generators, need motors to pull the blocks up, need fans to remove heat, maybe even other cooling systems. Need MASSIVE structural reinforcement to hold up adequate weight. My guy tells me it is impractical. Of course, if government is willing to finance it, it becomes practical … to the builder/operator, because they will make money whether it is efficient or not (energywise).
And nobody has answered the main question - WHY does the energy need to be stored THERE in the city? Why not somewhere else outside the city, preferably closer to the original source of generation.
It doesn’t. People are just noticing that there are a lot of empty buildings “in the city”, and they are tall, and that could somehow (probably not efficiently) be used to make electricity with time arbitrage between low and high rate periods.
But it’s probably a pipe dream. A better use would be to house the homeless. (Ha ha, I make a joke.)