Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Water is way, way cheaper, and concrete requires a massive amount of water.
Just saying.
Water also doesn't get damaged through constantly moving it.
Thats a pretty fucking big on. Also, the technology to "turn a wheel" to create electricity.. pretty fucking established.
And.. god forbid, if the community you are in ends up needing water more than electricity, well, you've got a bunch stored and ready for other uses.
Yeah, emergency water reservoir isn't a bad thing to have. Not a first choice but less reliable powergrid is worth taking if it is the alternative to not having water.
the article says it's recycled though...
I mean I would guess it's for energy density not environmental savings of any kind.
I would guess it's because it's likely very low cost and easy to build, but there are obvious environmental savings that fall out of it naturally.
sigh.... Buh dim tish.
On the topic, I really doubt it's about savings at this scale, which is very much proof of concept. I mean it could be but at this stage it's more important to show it's potential. And for some thing that's gonna run for thousands of cycles..
I mean, unless they're directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn't actually help that much. You can't practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all "recycled" concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.
But you do that once, and the thing lasts 35 years, somehow I can't imagine environmental impact would be worse than mining and refining rare earths for regular batteries here.
I mean it depends on the energy density. Where the batteries go. Can they be just "slapped into" existing infrastructure? Can they rare earths be used effectively indefinitely once mined, and on and one and on.
An inability to imagine isn't a form of evidence.
Energy density has nothing to do with this. It's the cost of how much pollution refining the rare earths and making batteries produces vs the amount of pollution associated with construction of a building with pulleys that move weights up and down.