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How giant concrete balls on ocean floors could store renewable energy
In an effort to reduce the use of precious land to build renewable energy storage facilities, the Fraunhofer Institute has been cooking up a wild but plausible idea: dropping concrete storage spheres down to the depths of our oceans.
Fraunhofer has previously tested a smaller model in Europe's Lake Constance near the Rhine river, and is set to drop a full-size 3D-printed prototype sphere to the seabed off Long Beach near Los Angeles by the end of 2026. Fraunhofer researchers estimate StEnSea has a massive global storage potential of 817,000 gigawatt-hours in total – enough to power every one of approximately 75 million homes across Germany, France, and the UK put together for a year. According to Fraunhofer, StEnSea spherical storage is best suited for stabilizing power grids with frequency regulation support or operating reserves, and for arbitrage.
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