THAT WAS SIMPLE:

Remember that in order to release energy, you need some way to make electric charges flow, but that doesn't necessarily mean that in order to store energy, you need to move electric charges into place so that they can easily flow. Electrical energy can be stored, but it can also be generated on-demand from all sorts of other forms of potential energy, including electrical, chemical, nuclear, and even gravitational potential energy. And it's that very last storage method -- of gravitational potential energy -- that just might lead to the ultimate type of energy-storage device: a gravity battery.

Perhaps the first type of potential energy we learn about is also the simplest and most straightforward: gravitational potential energy. Whenever anything with a mass drops from a higher elevation to a lower elevation in Earth's gravitational field, including:

a ball rolling down a hill,

a book falling off a shelf,

a human falling from a standing to a prone position,

or a skydiver jumping out of an airplane,

you're witnessing an example of gravitational potential energy being converted into energy-of-motion, otherwise known as kinetic energy. We know, from experience (and from measurements), that balls rolled down hills reach the bottom in motion, with a large amount of kinetic energy. We know that books falling off shelves, humans falling down, or skydivers jumping out of airplanes all gain energy, and at the moment they hit the ground, their energy-of-motion (or kinetic energy) gets converted into many other types of energy: heat, sound, vibrations, etc.

The key is to realize that the "useful" energy that's released from the energy of motion all derives from the same source: an object that was previously raised up, in an energy-requiring move, against the gravitational pull of Earth.

Whenever you raise a mass to a higher elevation against the resistive force of Earth's gravity, you are performing work and increasing the weight's gravitational potential energy. When you release the raised weight, that potential energy gets converted into kinetic energy, which can be used to do work and can be converted into other forms of energy.

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Gravitational potential energy -- wherever you have it -- can just as easily be converted into electrical energy. For example, imagine the following setup:

you have a vertically-oriented chain with gears at the top and bottom,

with platforms affixed to the chain at various intervals,

and then you place a mass on one of the platforms near the top.

What happens next?

The mass falls, causing the chain to move and the gears to turn. Now, if you connect the gears to a turbine, the turbine will spin when the chain moves. If you use that spinning turbine to generate power, it will take that mechanical energy that went into the motion of the gear-chain-platform-mass system and convert it into electrical energy, which can now be distributed anywhere throughout a connected power grid.

In other words, just by having some masses that were raised up to some height, previously, you can generate power at any time -- in any amount (if you have enough raised masses) -- simply by moving the masses onto the high-elevation platforms, turning gravitational potential energy into mechanical energy and then into electrical energy.

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