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0 pointssambeau2y ago0 comments

I’ve seen a suggestion that you could use two spheres in the sea one deep down, one near the surface.

0 comments

I don't think so...

You would presumably be pumping air from one sphere to the other.

That air ends up compressing/decompressing, and therefore heating or getting cold. That dramatically lowers efficiency.

And on top of that, a football stadium sized sphere full of compressed air at the bottom of the ocean is going to need hold-down anchors at a scale the world has never seen...

sambeauOP2y ago

> "The general idea is to have a closed vessel sitting on the seafloor. Surplus energy is then used to pump water out of this vessel, leaving the inside at a near-vacuum. When it’s desired to recover energy from the system, water can be allowed to flow back into the vessel under the pressure generated by the seawater above. As the vessel is filled, the water flowing in turns a turbine, generating electricity in just the same way as a traditional pumped hydro system."

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/02/underwater-tanks-turn-energy...

https://www.iee.fraunhofer.de/en/topics/stensea.html

p1mrx2y ago

That's an interesting way to store energy, basically a vacuum chamber that operates in 75 atm water, instead of 1 atm air.

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