Could Gravity Batteries Bring Renewable Energy Storage to Your Home?

Sustainable energy sources like wind and solar face the challenge of storing excess energy for later use. Large utilities often use mechanical storage methods, such as lifting weights or pumping water uphill, to store energy and generate electricity when needed. While effective on a large scale, these “gravity batteries” haven’t been adapted for single homes. A team of Purdue University undergraduates studied whether a compact gravity battery could be designed for residential use.

“A gravity battery stores energy just like a AA battery would, except it’s more environmentally friendly,” said Caden Jarausch  , a senior in mechanical engineering, and lead author of the study. “Instead of using chemicals like lithium, it uses the potential energy of a heavy weight to turn gravity into electricity.”

Transcript

00:00:00 Here in the DC House, we're aiming to convert a  residential home to completely run on DC power. We   have solar panels on the roof, and we need a way  to store the energy, so that during the nighttime   when we can't get any more solar energy, we can  just use the energy that we stored. We didn't   want to go with chemical storage because there's  a lot of environmental issues. So we were trying   to look for an alternative that would hopefully be  a little more environmentally friendly. So that's   why we were looking into the gravity battery.  When you get excess energy, that energy can be   used to lift the weight from the basement floor  until it reaches the attic. And then whenever   you want to recoup that energy, you can just lower  that weight. If you just reverse the direction of   operation, you essentially have a generator. And  so the same way that it can use energy to create   translational motion, it can use translational  motion to create energy. We found that on the  

00:01:07 scale that we were trying to do it,  practically it wouldn't be used in a   home. But we still wanted to publish the paper  and everything because I think there's a bigger   message. Sometimes when you're doing research,  you're not going to get the expected result.   And sometimes that result is just as important  as if you were to get the expected result. To   actually have something built in front of you,  and constantly have improvements made to it to   help the environment, and a bigger broader  mission than just what you're working on,   can motivate you and incentivize you to put  your best work into whatever you're doing.