Oil wells used for storing excess energy from wind and solar

 Bakerville Californian:

Kern County oil fields look more and more like a viable place for storing renewable energy to help balance the state power grid.

Bakersfield startup Renewell Energy is working on its first commercial system using renewably powered winches to lift weights from near the bottom of oil wells. Later, after the sun goes down and wind stops, lowering the weights will run a generator that feeds the grid.

It's at least the second technology proposed for repurposing local oil fields to cover gaps in the availability of solar and wind power. Another Bakersfield company, Premier Resource Management LLC, hopes to turn depleted oil reservoirs into synthetic geothermal storage.

Renewell's simple gravity power system, as a much lower-price alternative to lithium batteries, offers a unique mix of benefits and drawbacks. It may be scaled up in series to discharge energy for long durations, for example, but it doesn't fully kick in for half a second to one second, leaving batteries a certain edge.

The technology might benefit Kern County by improving the economics of plugging idle or abandoned wells while generating rental income for their owners and preserving some of the property's taxable value to local government.
...

Texas has been a leader in the use of wind and solar and it has existing oil well infrastructure that could be used for storing energy.  If the energy storage operation is successful, it would make sense for Teas to do the same.

See, also:

'Breakthrough' geothermal tech produces 3.5 megawatts of carbon-free power

Fervo Energy's Nevada site is slated to power Google data centers.

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