Photo above – Microsoft Flight Simulator accidentally created a giant skyscraper in the middle of Australia. The US government wants to fund a battery skyscraper 1,000 feet taller.
Move over solar panels, wind turbines, tidal turbines, geothermal energy, green hydrogen, blue hydrogen, nuclear power . . . there’s a new energy sheriff in town. The US government is now funding research into a “battery” which will be nearly a mile high. I am not making this up. See the CNN link at bottom.
This theoretical mega skyscraper is a battery only in the sense that you can put daytime energy in, and discharge it later, at night. But it’s not a mile of stacked lithium-ion cells (Tesla uses the “18650” size, about the same as a AA cell). In fact, a mile high skyscraper of lithium ion cells might possibly use up all the lithium on our planet.
The skyscraper battery – if it’s ever actually built – would be a giant elevator. A box suspended from cables. Presumably packed with concrete or scrap metal. You haul it up to the 1,000th floor with solar power when the sun is shining. Then a grandfather-clock gear system slowly lowers it at night, feeding electricity back into the grid. I am sooooo not making this up. Jules Verne must be rolling over in his grave, lol.
If this was just some harebrained scheme by venture capitalists, I wouldn’t mind. But one of the partners in this venture is “Energy Vault” (not to be confused with Vault Energy, the sports drink. Stand by for a possible trademark lawsuit). Energy Vault is a money losing venture dependent on the Inflation Reduction Act to keep it from dying an early death. It actually HAS built a few batteries, but none involving skyscrapers thousands of feet high. Even though Energy Vault's existing product line is more down to earth, it still loses tens of millions of dollars a year. Let me repeat, this entire project is only possible because of the “Inflation Reduction Act”, which so far has NOT reduced inflation. It appears to simply be a conduit for shoveling tax dollars at tech companies hooked up with Washington insiders. The Inflation Reduction Act was in the news LAST week for giving billions to Intel, which promptly laid off 15,000 workers.
We already spend billions on solar, wind turbines, experimental hydrogen, and tax rebates on electric vehicles. Do we really need a mile-high “skyscraper battery” right now? We have a $35 trillion national debt because of crazy ideas like this, which politicians never say no to.
Now glance back up at the top picture. As disclosed in the caption, that is NOT an artist's rendering of Energy Vaults 1,000-meter-high skyscraper. It’s the famous aeronautical hazard in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. Due to a programming error, a 2,200 foot high skyscraper was placed in Melbourne Australia. Microsoft decided to leave it as is, for shock effect, and to test the navigational skills of their gamer/pilots. Now imagine the Energy Vault skyscraper, as an actual flight hazard. It would be 1000 FEET TALLER. Imagine planes trying to navigate past it at night. Imagine hurricane force winds making it sway. Imagine even low-Richter scale earthquakes. Imagine some terrorist in a hijacked 737. Imagine flocks of migrating birds. Imagine the amount of lubrication and maintenance required for this obelisk’s mile high tangle of cables and gears.
Imagine future civilizations visiting the ruins of this structure, collapsing in laughter, and, asking “WTH!!!! What were they thinking?” A nuclear reactor HAS to be 10X times safer than trying to raise a huge block of concrete a mile into the sky.
I’m just sayin’ . . .
~The next world’s tallest building could be a 3,000-feet-high battery | CNN~
Would you believe a skyscraper sized battery, nearly a mile high, is getting government funding?
byu/baltimore-aureole ineconomy
by baltimore-aureole
2 comments
Highly innefficient
From stackexchange
>Let’s spin some numbers to further illustrate the poor energy density of gravity-based storage systems. Assume that you have a 100 kilogram lead weight that you can lower into a 10 meter deep hole in your yard.
>Now, how much energy can it store? This is given by potential energy formula E=mgh, thus E=100kg⋅9.8m/s2⋅10m=9.8kJ≈2.7Wh.
>For comparison, a single AA-sized battery stores about 2Wh of energy.
I saw a design like this that used a crane to hoist up blocks using energy captured, then that crane would lower the heavy bocks down to generate energy. Doesn’t make any sense why it would need to be a mile high. Seems like that would cost astronomically more because of engineering a building that tall.