the, the living independently rise to our society is full of contrasts and any policy is a big challenge. many problems can only be solved by working together. yes, i think of each other's and misleading. what is home? how do we tackle the major issues about time? because there is a significant risk of human extinction from advancing our systems and changes the

new frontier. so from our series continues on d w. thank and this is a battery. it might not look like one, but this way it starts the energy it took to move it up here. when it's released, it can pull up this light and sort of companies want to bit lots residents of this really large hind to this guy. deep into the ground or on mountains, it's called gravity energy storage or gravity, battery flush out, and the companies behind them are making a boss, saying they would be able to store large amounts of renewable energy for times when supply is chilled. like when the sun is shining and the winds doesn't float, that's where a novel, new energy storage technology comes to play. they didn't find announcing that it is

investing a $110000000.00. why are we not spending trillions right now to be building this stuff? so our gravity, batteries going to make it big. first, let's take a look at how these batteries work. when we produce more electricity, then we need to like in the middle of the day, when this lots of solar energy, we can use that energy to lift a heavy weight. it just hangs around until we low it again. the motor becomes a generator and feeds electricity back into the grid. this technology could be a good way to cut c o 2 emissions. we need a lot of renewable energy and places to store it. the international energy agency says more than 25000 speaking of an o. s by 24. that's enough to power countries like power. ugh, why or 2 unusual for an entire year. and it's $2.00 times more storage than we have today. but those numbers don't fully capture the challenge today. most energy

storage is pumped storage hydropower, so dams and rest of us, we've talked about that in a moment, but we won't be able to nearly triple that kind of capacity. so actually we need to expend all the storage, not 2.8, but at least to 22 times more than we can today. now that's a challenge to achieve this huge growth and storage capacity. developers has mainly been looking at lithium ion batteries like the bottom, your phone, laptop, just a lot bigger. it has a number of problems though. we've made a video about it, which you can find to you. in short, lithium money pollutes the environment and exploits people. sometimes to better use catch fire or explode, they degrade rather quickly. and today's grid scale it, do you mind batteries can still only a few hours energy to cover the daily peaks in the month. but with more and more renewable energy, we need even more reliable, short and long term storage that could be 6 hours, 6 days,

6 weeks or even months. like i said earlier, pump storage hydropower is great for this. it's been around for more than a century and still makes up over 95 percent of our storage capacity. you pump the water up windows and edit this up less and let it flow down who tab binds when energy is needed. notice anything? yep, that's gravity at work. time tighter has tried and tested but doesn't work just any way. it requires lots of construction work and disrupts natural habitats. and you need to have a lot of water. it's not easy to scale it but, but the gravity principle is we basically mirror that same process, but instead of water for one of our solutions, we use blocks. that's all that the conic co founder and ceo of can edge involved with current to use the biggest gravity energy storage. develop the arrows essentially dependent on the size of the system can be up to thousands of them for

systems. second, 2020, and then do all the this prototype in switzerland, 6 crane stick, the concrete blocks up to a height of 17 meters. the prototype proves that the concept works, but it also received criticism such as that the structure didn't comply with building codes or might not really stand extreme weather and the thousands of tons of concrete that went into the blocks or anything but climate friendly. so i did you what came up with this gravity bet to rebuilding thousands of blocks are listed all low it and then stalled horizontally as seen here. or the 1st battery of that kind went into operation in rudolf chung. so province in china, in may of this year, it's taller than the great perimeter of keys and stock. more than 3 and a half 1000 blocks weighing $25.00 tons each. they were made on site from excavated, sorry about the company. it says it could use waste materials such as cold as the old wind turbine plates, and it's 100 megawatt hour. so that you can think that equivalent to power in about

35000 homes. but only for 2 to 3 hours. the company plans to bit fault to give it all as of gravity, batteries for china, or 40 times this one. now the smaller storage facility is suppose to go online and snider, texas this year. and plants on the way in southern africa to the company has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, including items, saudi, a, remco, and leo. not a dicaprio because you must admit it all sounds very promising. it's predictable, like some type of storage, but can be paid pretty much anywhere. it doesn't need scarce resources and it lost a lot longer than that to mind. storage. that's because with less you mind chemical processes, aging and heat limit, better we live to know more than 15 years. look at your phone and how long the battery loss now compared to when you bought it. it's the same thing. the gravity batteries couldn't see erie lift the weight and keep it up for 60 years. then what

are some items replacing? but the weights installed energy would remain in place. the biggest drawback is the cost that's having a strike senior research associate at bloomberg. any f energy storage team, they've recently published a study comparing several long duration energy storage solutions, including gravity storage. and what we found is that gravity, batteries have a higher average cost and higher cost range from all the other long duration technologies. one of the reasons that they have a very high cost is because we have very low energy density. so you need sort of larger infrastructure in order to get to the same in order to store the same energy as you would need for lithium ion battery. for example. the gravity battery interview don't stuff the same amount of energy as this lithium ion battery. but the gravity battery needs much more space and bidding materials. so the initial cost is higher. it also loses out in other ways. storage operate as the money by

discharging the energy and selling it for more than they paid chemical storage, like lithium and can react and milliseconds to market needs, which allows for a lot of quick profit taking a gravity battery mechanically lifts and lowest weight, which takes time and limits profit options. so gravity, battery capacity is more expensive. right now. it's doubled the cost of lifting mine technology. but develop as like energy box one to convince investors to think long term. because they have such a long life time. so 5060 years, which is considerably higher compared to lithium ion. um they may claims that level lice costs of storage over the duration of the project. life time is is lower. if the high startup costs of gravity, batteries even out over time, partly due to the low cost of maintenance that might make them competitive in the long run. that can we make these batteries cheap and now let's go on the ground.

the deeper the mind, the cheaper it is, the more energy you can store julian hot and has been researching gravity batteries for a number of us. he's proposing to put them in the shops of the commission mines. we looked at a $1500.00 underground coal mines and from these coal mines we, we estimate the capacity of a 70 total water hour of storage. $7.00 to $10.00 of the hours of energy is huge. it's what the entire world needs in a day, and it's 700000 times the capacity of this. and that's just old coal mine chests, which i particularly deep abandoned to methyl minds, could also work to companies from scotland. and australia has been small pilot projects above crowns and one to install gravity, batteries, and from

a mines in europe and australia. the idea is to have a small number of very heavy weights moving up and down the empty shaft installation costs for this kind of gravity. energy storage could be fairly low. underground mines have the road access. they have transmission lines into the mind . so you can use that credit tricity and green gravity hope to go online with this type of storage by 2027. they say the energy could be stored for up to 9 or even 12 hours. but julian, honda is looking for longer storage times, much longer. so for example, for one season to another from one year to another, energy could then be stored when it's really cheap and used when it's much more expensive, which could make it a profitable solution. whether it's 4 hours a month, we'd only know if this system works as planned once it's been built. there also some, even those designs for efficient gravity batteries, like stinking

a giant piston into the ground and raising and lowering it with the waltz underneath. the idea has been around for years but has increased the pilot stage ships. and now the idea involves weights on wagons, on race going up and down and mountain. that idea is over 10 years old, but hasn't gone anywhere yet. and i do vote is planning an updated version which looks a bit like a ski lift with weights. they say this system could be more efficient than the stand alone cavity batteries they're making. now. we don't do anything small gravity. uh, in fact, a 100 megawatt hour in china is the smallest we would ever do everything we're looking at now. for these applications of gravity, libertine slopes and things are all, most likely you one hours. and soon gravity batteries might be installed and skyscrapers. and then to all the plans to do just that in collaboration with an engineering company. gravity energy storage is still in its infancy that can't compete with the scale and low cost of lithium ion storage. but it doesn't have to,

since gravity storage is intended for long term storage of 6 hours or more. but there are other new technologies in that energy segment that are already more cost effective today. like total energy compressed air or gas and it just started. and according to bloomberg, any f, the cost of gravity, energy storage is likely to drop by only 2 percent per year. i would not say we say this becoming mainstream. um, i think a big part of the excitement is because it's normal and so simple. and like so their friend, conceptually, what we think of us as battery. so gravity, batteries might become one of many options to store energy long term. but you probably won't be seeing many of these popping up near you any time soon. if you want to learn more about all the energy storage technologies like solid or even the ocean, go check out our channel and subscribe. we post

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