Australian gravity storage startup Green Gravity has revealed it is building a new R&D facility in New South Wales, Australia.
Green Gravity said its new R&D facility will also be commissioned with a digital twin unit. A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physically deployed system and can be used to test new components or hypotheses before testing them in the physical world.
The startup, led by former BHP executive Mark Swinnerton, says the deployment of digital resources at Gravity Lab will enable rapid data validation for commercial-scale energy storage systems. It is partnering with Bluescope and AI specialist xAmplify to build Gravity Lab, and has secured support from NVIDIA.
Green Gravity’s technology involves lifting and releasing heavy weights in old mine shafts. The concept is similar to other gravitational energy storage technologies, but Swinnerton said using old mine shafts instead of purpose-built tall towers is a competitive advantage. This is because repurposing abandoned but abundant infrastructure lowers costs and is better for the environment.
“By reusing mining assets, costs can be kept low,” Swinnterton said. “By using gravity as a fuel, we avoid using critical water, land and chemicals that other storage technologies rely on.”
He argued that Green Gravity can add capacity at similar unit costs to pumped hydro, but with significantly lower capital costs.
“So you don’t have to pay A$700 million ($468 million) like some of the big pumped systems,” Swinnerton said previously. pv-lehti Australia. You just say, ‘Well, we’ll pay 30 million Australian dollars’. You get less energy, but you get the same unit cost result as pumped hydro, and there are a lot of them.”
In November 2022, Green Gravity and GHD Group signed a letter of intent to develop new applications for the startup’s storage solutions. It also completed domestic capital raising in 2022, but aims to raise significantly more global capital.
Green Gravity claims to have found at least 3 GWh of potential storage capacity in the 175 sites it has assessed and found suitable.
“There’s more than available – and that’s just in Australia,” said Swinnterton.
