Gravity Battery: A New Innovation for a Sustainable Energy Storage

Despite the fact that renewable energy resources play a significant role in dealing with the global warming and in achieving carbon neutrality, they cannot be effectively used until they combine with a suitable energy storage technology. Gravity batteries are viewed as promising and sustainable energy storage, they are clean, free, easy accessible, high efficiency, and long lifetime. There are six technologies of gravity battery: Gravitricity, Mountain Gravity Energy Storage (MGES), Energy Vault, Marlon’s Energy Storage Blog, Sink Float Soltuion, and Advanced Rail Energy Storage. The current papers aims at presenting the different gravity batteries technologies and comparing between them in terms of LCOS, advantages, drawbacks, power rating, life time and efficiency. Results showed that the common advantages of the presented technologies of gravity batteries are the scalability, high efficiency, long lifetime that can reach 50 years, fast ramp up, and low LCOS with a range of 50$/MWh for gravitricity and 770 $/MWh for the technology Sink Float solution with wind turbine. Moreover, the gravitricity has the highest efficiency, for energy storage that can reach 90%, and the longest lifetime (up to 50 years). The cheapest technology is the MGES. The main disadvantages are the short term storage, and the availability of data for the methods that use the abandoned mines.