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"I went back to science fiction to try a few experiments …and my first experiment was a disaster…"
- Alfred Bester

Large Utility Calibrated Yield (LUCY)  
  Storage of solar and wind power as potential energy.  

Energy storage at city scale; large buildings with huge weights hoisted up high, supervised by an AI.

Ice has gotten into the wheel mechanisms. Ice still comes to the city – not as much as historically, but it happens.Lucy is supposed to keep all the weights moving a little, to keep them from freezing up, but the storm was unusually brutal and so Great Lakes Amalgamated’s Large Utility Calibrated Yield AI, LUCY, has put out the call for some good old-fashioned chiseling.

James locks the S-17 column on his smartphone, engages the physical gear-locks, resets his safety harness, and rappels down to where the iced-over weights dangle high above the city. He gets to work, chipping ice from the guide wheels.In his earbuds, Lucy says hello. “You’re late.”

...Lucy moves thousands of weights up and down the faces of Willis Tower and the Hancock Building. The weights ride on smooth electromagnetic rails, each weight independently latching onto cables and pulleys that in turn attach and detach to flywheels and generators, all of them orchestrated by Lucy as she responds to the ever-shifting requirements of GLA’s grid. Lucy absorbs the winds on the lake with her turbines, she feels the heat of the sun on her solar skin, and she plans and strategizes all the time. When a surfeit of sunlight or wind surges into the grid, Lucy harvests the power and winches weights high into the air. By slapping one-ton weights together like giant Lego bricks, connecting one to the next with clamps, and pushing them up the sides of the building, she hoists hundreds of tons of potential energy up into the air. Then, when demand surges, she lets precise numbers of the weighted bricks fall, generating exactly the amount of power that the grid demands, increment by increment. At the same time, she creates a constantly moving light display all up and down the skyscraper as bricks rise, fall, connect, some higher, some lower, something always moving, a living visualization of the power usage of the city.

Technovelgy from Efficiency, by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Published by Habitat Press in 2022
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