As usual everyone is fixated on price when the real hurdle will be scale. If we're going to replace our existing fossil fuel plants we need at least as much capacity. A quick grep in the article tells me these guys have a plan for a 4MW plant that involves a 1km shaft. That's the same order of magnitude as a
single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land use.
For reference (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station):
> As of 2018 coal power under construction was 236 GW, planned 339 GW, and 50 GW was commissioned and 31 GW retired
If we want to replace those new plants we'll need 100.000 of those shafts. And that's not counting the existing plants, and the other fossil-fuel based plants. Think of the quantity of concrete that involves. That's just insane. If we want to actively tackle electricity generation we need to use the most efficient low-carbon tech that we already know.
Also, we already have gravity-based systems, only nature does all the work of raising the payload for us in gaseous form, and we let it fall in liquid forms. But it takes so much dam place.
For reference (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station):
> As of 2018 coal power under construction was 236 GW, planned 339 GW, and 50 GW was commissioned and 31 GW retired
If we want to replace those new plants we'll need 100.000 of those shafts. And that's not counting the existing plants, and the other fossil-fuel based plants. Think of the quantity of concrete that involves. That's just insane. If we want to actively tackle electricity generation we need to use the most efficient low-carbon tech that we already know.
Also, we already have gravity-based systems, only nature does all the work of raising the payload for us in gaseous form, and we let it fall in liquid forms. But it takes so much dam place.