Gigantic concrete balls: California tests revolutionary energy storage!

These concrete balls, which are anchored in depths of 500 to 600 meters on the sea floor, use a principle that resemble that of pumped storage power plants. When the energy is excess, water is pumped out of the cavity of the ball. As soon as there is electricity, the water flows back and drives a turbine. The test run with a ball that weighs 400 tons and offers a storage capacity of 0.4 megawatt hours (400 kWh) is promising.

efficient energy storage

The average four-person household in Germany consumes around 4,000 kWh per year, which underlines the importance of this new technology. Previous tests with smaller balls that had a diameter of three meters were successfully carried out in Lake Constance. In the long term, a development of concrete balls with a diameter of up to 30 meters is planned in order to be able to save even greater amounts of energy.

The long -term goal of this project is to promote the scaling and commercialization of the memory concept. This environmentally friendly solution could be a promising alternative to conventional pumped storage power plants. The advantage lies in the lower area stress and the minimal impairment of the landscape.

worldwide storage potential

The technology has an impressive worldwide storage potential of around 820,000 gigawatt hours. For comparison: all existing German pumped storage works reach only a quarter of this capacity. In particular, the ten best locations in Europe could cover up to a fifth of the global potential, with Norway, Portugal, Brazil, Japan, Japan and US coast and deep lakes being identified as suitable locations.