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Europe’s deepest mine to become giant gravity battery (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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An abandoned mine in Finland is set to be transformed into a giant battery to store renewable energy during periods of excess production.

The Pyhäsalmi Mine, roughly 450 kilometres north of Helsinki, is Europe’s deepest zinc and copper mine and holds the potential to store up to 2 MW of energy within its 1,400-metre-deep shafts.

The disused mine will be fitted with a gravity battery, which uses excess energy from renewable sources like solar and wind in order to lift a heavy weight. During periods of low production, the weight is released and used to power a turbine as it drops.

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[–] [email protected] 137 points 9 months ago (37 children)

holds the potential to store up to 2 MW of energy

2nd paragraph and he's already lost me. It would be nice if tech columnists had the equivalent of even a single semester of high school physics.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Alright, I've been to high school but never understood "Wh". For speed we say "They are moving at 25 km/h aka 25km per hour" --> in one hour the object will have traveled 25km. per indicates division. Same for flow rate (cubic meters per second --> l/s) --> "The swimming pool of 5m³ was filled at 0.5m³/h and took 10h to fill".

If something generates or consumes 10W per hour, shouldn't that be 10W/h not 10Wh? If I hold an object that weighs 100g for an hour, doesn't that mean I have been exerting myself at the gravitational force of the 100g object for 1 hour --> (100g * 9.832m²/s) / h --> (100g*9.832m²/s) / 3600s and thus the units being g * m² * s⁻² which are joules? How does that equate to "watt hours" Can somebody explain this to me conceptually? It makes no sense to me.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What you're forgetting is that Watt isn't a unit of energy, it's a unit of power, that is energy per time. So you wouldn't say something generates 1W per hour, you'd just say something generates 1W. And if you multiply that by a unit of time, you get total energy. So an engine producing 2MW running for 5h would produce 10MWh, or 36GJ.

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