I’m pretty skeptical about this- wouldn’t a 30m sphere be incredibly buoyant when empty? I get its concrete, but it’s displacing huge amounts of water. So you’d need some massive anchoring, maybe that’s not a big deal. Second, I don’t know what depths we’re talking about here, but I feel like the stress from cycling these things daily would be insane- in high pressure salt water no less. I also wonder what the efficiency of this system would be compared to other similar batteries, like pumped hydro storage. It seems to me pumping out water to near vacuum while under crushing outside water pressure would be a significant power hog.

[–] Lupus@feddit.org 21 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don’t know what depths we’re talking about here,

From the article:

The idea is relatively simple: hollow concrete spheres are installed at a depth of several hundred metres.

[–] carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks, I missed that on my read through - 1000 feet of water is pretty serious pressure.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago

The more pressure the more "equivalent head" power discharge potential. Separate "vacuum pump" (instead of bidirectional) could also have several stages to improve efficiency.

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