Anicet Mbida 06:54, June 02, 2022

Every day, Anicet Mbida makes us discover an innovation that could well change the way we consume.

This Thursday, he is interested in a surprising idea for storing solar or wind electricity: transforming skyscrapers into giant batteries.

This morning, you come up with a surprising idea for storing solar or wind electricity: transforming skyscrapers into giant batteries. 

Gravity batteries to be precise… The concept is quite simple: everything rests on the elevator shaft of a very high tower.

As soon as we produce an excess of renewable energy, rather than letting it go to waste in nature, we use it to raise weights as high as possible with an elevator car.

And as soon as we need energy, we let these weights go down again, by gravity in the column, and we recover electricity with generators installed in the pulleys. 

It's very clever.

An idea that we owe to a team of researchers from IIASA in Vienna, Austria.

I really like the name they gave it: “LEST”, the acronym for Lift Energy Storage System.

That is, elevator energy storage system. 

It will be reserved for new skyscrapers or it can work on those already built? 

This is precisely the interest.

The technique can easily be adapted to existing buildings.

You should know that many tall towers have already equipped their elevators with an energy recovery system when descending.

In this case, it will be even faster to integrate.

It will still be necessary to manage the comings and goings of the elevators well, otherwise users risk spending their time waiting for them. 

And you can store a lot of energy like that, in a skyscraper? 

Obviously, this will depend on its size and the rate of use of the elevators.

But the researchers estimate that with all the skyscrapers on the planet, we could store up to 300 gigawatt-hours of energy, the equivalent of what a city like New York consumes in a month.

Which isn't bad.

Especially since we are talking about an infrastructure already present in the heart of cities.

There is nothing else to build. 

So it will never replace conventional batteries.

It is a system that would have difficulty in absorbing large consumption peaks.

But it's one more tool, cheap, to tackle a problem that will become more and more glaring: that of energy storage.