Deep Mine Shaft Required

[PeteHall]

I wonder if such a system could be built into an active mine shaft. Boulby is bloody deep (forget the exact figure) and the new Sirius Minerals one is something like 1.5km deep...

 

[Graigwen]

If it's a mineshaft, shouldn't it be fathoms?

The fathom is a pretty handy historical unit in the UK, and when you are familiar with using fathoms they are easy to visualise. However in the modern day they generally lead to confusion as most people are not familiar with them and they are always inconvenient when calculating gravitational potential energy as you have to do an extra conversion step.

Years ago when I worked for a large Canadian mining corporation re-evaluating some Welsh mineral prospects, we had to be careful to avoid using metric units in material we sent to Canada as the corporation worked withj Imperial units only. I sent a load of geophysical and geochemical surveys (in feet, yards and miles) accompanied by mine plans and sections in fathoms and yards. The response was a baffled enquiry about "fms" which they did not understand.

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[Graigwen]

kWh is a much better unit to use when talking energy use.  Joules are all a bit old fashioned and cumbersome and kWh are the unit used by utility companies. 

Joules are not at all old fashioned, they are the SI unit for energy. The SI unit for power (i.e. the rate of energy conversion) is the watt, which is just another way of saying one joule per second.

The kWh is an old fashioned unit still used by some utility companies, largely for historical reasons as British consumers are used to it. The kWh is cumbersome to use since it contains time twice, once in the form of the SI unit for time the second and also in the form of the non SI unit the hour. As the energy (in other words joules) is both divided by time (seconds) and multiplied by time (hours) the kWh is just a clumsy way of stating a certain amount of energy and is therefore equivalent to a certain number of joules.

1 KWh  =  60 x 60 x 1000J  = 3,600,000J = 3.6MJ



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[Chocolate fireguard]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/how-uks-disused-mine-shafts-plan-to-store-renewable-energy
Doesn't contain much more information.
Does contain the usual mashup of units but at least doesn't talk about massive weights.

 

[mrodoc]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/how-uks-disused-mine-shafts-plan-to-store-renewable-energy

 

[Chocolate fireguard]

?

 

[notdavidgilmour]

Pen y bryn is 800 ft

It's well 'n' truly capped and hidden though