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The Advanced Rail Energy Storage is a 19th century solution for a 21st century problem.
In April, the Bureau of Land Management approved an ARES—that’s Advanced Rail Energy Storage—project, conceived by a Santa Barbara-based energy startup called, well, ARES. By 2019, ARES operations head Francesca Cava says, the facility will occupy 106 acres in the excellently-named town of Pahrump, Nevada. By running a train up and down a hill, ARES can help utilities add to and subtract from the grid as needed.
The Nevada project has a power capacity of 50 megawatts and can produce 12.5 megawatt-hours of energy. That’s relatively large, especially compared to a lot of battery storage projects. But it might not be large enough to make money. “Fifty megawatts doesn’t get us to economies of scale,” ARES CEO James Kelly admitted in an interview with UtilityDive. “We are more efficient as we get larger.”
Storing energy by moving a heavy train upwards against gravity and recovering the energy as it comes back down into the valley... not saying it doesn't work, but it seems awfully heavy and expensive.