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Meeting our growing energy demands without continuing to destroy the planet might be one of the biggest challenges of our time, and it calls for some pretty creative solutions. Swiss company Energy Vault has just launched an innovative new system that stores potential energy in a huge tower of concrete blocks, which can be "dropped" by a crane to harvest the kinetic energy.
With a focus on storing energy from intermittent renewable sources such as wind and solar, the Energy Vault takes advantage of some fundamental physics. If you coil a spring, for example, you're packing it with potential energy – as soon as you let it go, that energy is unleashed as the spring extends itself back out. This new system scales that up to the grid level.
In this case, that potential energy is stored inside huge concrete blocks. To charge up this skyscraper-sized "battery," a six-armed crane lifts the blocks off the ground and stacks them up around its base, creating a tower. To discharge, the crane simply lower the blocks back to the ground, converting the kinetic energy from the descent into electricity. Proprietary algorithms calibrate and control the charge and discharge cycles to make it as efficient as possible.