Technology

I have a feeling this is where the suburban and rural grids are going. Dense urban areas are likely still going to need power produced off site.

What I'm more interested in will be farms in whether they'll stay traditional producing food or convert solar farms where food production is not the main focus (see the hops farming solar panels for example).

Please do the maths on "lifting weights up a tall tower.

Actually no, I'll do it for you.

Let's raise a metric ton 10 storeys. A storey is about 3 meters, making that 1000kg going 30 meters up. Mass (1000kg) x g (9.81m/s² ≈ 10m/s²) x height (30m) is about 300,000 joules of energy. We don't use joules much, but they are the amount of energy you use is you draw 1w for 1 second. 300,000Ws. 3,600 seconds in an hour, so 83Wh.

Not kWh, Wh. You might run your TV for an hour.

You'd need to lift 100 tons 100 storeys to get it to kWh. 83kWh. A car battery worth of storage.

This is the reason pumped-hydro storage is a thing. To make lifting a mass a decent energy storage solution, you need a lot of mass. About the order of one lake of water. One plant I visited in Scotland has a reservoir of 10 million tons of water elevated 400 meters, to give it 7GWh of storage. That's a fairly small one, and 36 men died building it back in the 50s/60s.

Gravity storage needs BIG numbers.

It's not difficult, but it is expensive and inefficient. There are very few financially viable battery technologies on the market currently, and although incremental improvements are happening on that front, there are also roadblocks (lack of raw materials like cobalt, toxic metals, thermal runaway fire risks), we really need a big breakthrough before we'll see large adoption of batteries.