An abandoned mine in Finland is set to be transformed into a giant battery to store renewable energy during periods of excess production.
The Pyhäsalmi Mine, roughly 450 kilometres north of Helsinki, is Europe’s deepest zinc and copper mine and holds the potential to store up to 2 MW of energy within its 1,400-metre-deep shafts.
The disused mine will be fitted with a gravity battery, which uses excess energy from renewable sources like solar and wind in order to lift a heavy weight. During periods of low production, the weight is released and used to power a turbine as it drops.
2nd paragraph and he’s already lost me. It would be nice if tech columnists had the equivalent of even a single semester of high school physics.
How many horsepower is your car’s gas tank?
I googled
Pyhäsalmi Mine gravitricity "2 MW"and EVERY article covering this has also cited 2 MW.Now, under Occam’s Razor, what’s more likely:
I don’t know which one it is. But I’d generally lean against 1.
#2 is certainly food for thought. So the idea is that from a journalistic fact-checking point of view, it is more important to convey the information exactly as it was presented than to verify its accuracy?
This would explain why science/engineering-based articles are so commonly inaccurate or missing in critical details. The journalist can fall back on saying “I have a recording of an interview with the expert after we downed a few pints at the pub, and I’m just parroting back what he said. Don’t shoot the messenger!”
I’d honestly prefer raw parroting in most cases, even if it’s “obviously” wrong. I don’t want people selectively interpreting the facts as have been conveyed to them, unless they’re prepared to do a proper peer review.
That’s what [sic] is for though. You fact check, and then leave the quote as the press release had it.
The problem is that most of these articles are basically reprinting of the press release without any editorial additions at all.
I’d wager they let bots crawl articles and have said ai bots rewrite them slightly. Internet journalism is completely lost.
Mistakes like this could be avoided if we just used joules for energy and watts for power.
Or just joules per second for power. Eliminate watts entirely. Dumbass unit
Well, Watts are just a different way to write Joules per second. The unit we should eliminate is {k,M}W.h which introduce a 3.6 factor in conversions to/from the regular unit system
Yeah but if we all wrote “joules per second” instead of watts we’d encourage everyone to measure energy in joules instead of watt-hours. It’s like speed, we don’t need an entirely separate unit that just means m/s
It’s especially confusing when trying to size a surge protector. The surge protector uses joules, whereas most devices use watts, and you generally need more protection the more power your devices pull.