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"GravityLight is a revolutionary new approach to storing energy and creating illumination. It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent. For free."
What are everyone's thoughts on this? I hope they succeed. I would like to see this happen. Imagine no lighting bills, except the initial expense of the equipment. It's eco-friendly so there's no pollution. Imagine of we had this kind of lighting before coal power. It might have influenced our approach to energy.
Storing energy by raising a weight against gravity is a very old technology. The first escapement clocks were operated from energy stored in drive weights by raising the weights by hand once a day or week. Using the same method to drive a small generator to operate a hand light or charge a Li-ion battery are other applications. At he other end of the gravity driven energy storage are the pumped hydroelectric electric energy storage systems. These store energy by pumping a huge mass of water to an upper reservoir during energy surplus time on the grid and releasing this water through turbines to generate electricity during high load periods. This technology is well understood and has a long and safe history. These facilities are quite large and some have the capacity to provide up to 4,000 MWe for over 12 hours.
I had, in one of my flights of fancy, considered having an LED reading light powered by the weight of a person stepping up to, and sitting in, a reading chair. The weight of the person in the chair would be more than adequate to power it, and with the chair counterbalanced so that it rose upon the person rising out of it, the only work would be plopping down in the chair. Larger people could read "War and Peace", while lightweights would be stuck with magazines and novellas...
That would work as the energy would be generated by the reader's muscles and stored as a raised center of mass and recovered as the person's CG was lowered to sit in the chair.
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Gravity light or heavy
