Edinburgh-based Gravitricity’s energy battery system works by utilising and raising a range of weights totalling up to 12,000 tonnes that are suspended in deep mine shafts. Electrical power can be absorbed or generated by raising or lowering the weight. The company had signed a land rental agreement with Forth Ports to build their first £1m demonstrator project on land within the Port of Leith in Edinburgh. Work on the industrial site will commence in October with Gravitricity aiming to have the project up and running by December.
Gravitricity’s concept has secured £650,000 in government funding from Innovate UK. Gravitricity wants to build models ranging between 1 to 20MW, with each system running for 50 years. Energy storage installations are poised for a 122-fold increase between now and 2040, as the uptake of renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs) and falling costs of technology provides an ideal platform to drive demand for storage solutions. Facilitation of this demand will require $662bn of investment, according to BNEF, but will be made possible by further declines in the cost of lithium-ion batteries, which have already fallen by 85% between 2010 and 2018.
Gravitricity claims that its energy storage solution will have a levelised cost “well below” that of lithium batteries, with the output duration able to range from 15 minutes to eight hours to serve a variety of needs.
Source: Edie
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