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Futuristic plans for world's tallest skyscraper twice as high as One World Trade Center and designed to store power
Futuristic plans for the world's tallest skyscraper which is twice as high as the One World Trade Center and is designed to store power have been revealed.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the architecture firm behind iconic structures like the supertall building in New York and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, have teamed up with energy storage company Energy Vault to design the structures for storing renewable energy.
The pair are looking to develop new gravity energy storage solutions and this mega-building would be used use an electricity-powered motor to lift giant blocks into the air when electricity demand is low.
These blocks would then store the electricity as 'potential' energy and would be would be lowered when the city's energy needs increasing - transforming the energy into electricity.
The giant tower could reach incredible heights of up to a whopping 3,300ft - making it three times bigger than The Shard - and would house residents and have commercial spaces.
The super-tower could reach incredible heights of up to a whopping 3,300ft - making it three times bigger than The Shard - and would house residents and have commercial spaces
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Energy Vault are looking to develop new gravity energy storage solutions and this mega-building would be used use an electricity-powered motor to lift giant blocks into the air when electricity demand is low.
These blocks would then store the electricity as 'potential' energy and would be would be lowered when the city's energy needs increasing - transforming the energy into electricity
This setup could store enough energy to power numerous buildings with multi-gigawatt-hour capacity.
The concept has already been proven to work thanks to the 492ft energy-storing mega-structure in China which was successfully built by Energy Vault.
The buildings would help towards the world successfully reaching zero targets by 2050, after the International Energy Association said technology which is connected to the power grid that can store and distribute energy when necessary needed to be expanded.
Storage is crucial for balancing generation and consumption and a combination of technologies — from various forms of batteries to other energy storage methods — will likely be necessary to increase capacity.
The two companies are also looking to explore the futuristic use of pumped storage hydropower in skyscrapers, potentially replacing the designed blocks with water.
This would see a a turbine pumping water from a reservoir on lower ground to one on higher ground during off-peak hours.
The water is then released to flow through an electricity-generated turbine once the demand goes up.