Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving - Albert Einstein
The other day an idea popped into my head and I haven't been able to get it out since. I've been very interested in solar energy lately and how nobody has really found an efficient way to store the energy created by it. Then my mind wandered to the simple lessons of potential and kinetic energy that I learned in my college physics class.
My idea involves putting a pump at the bottom of large energy producing dams like Hoover. At night water is released to power the grid. During the daytime solar energy is used to power the grid and any energy not utilized by the grid is used to pump the water back to the top of the dam so that it is turned back into potential energy.
A variation of the idea involves having a field or plant of piston-like weights that are alternately raised by solar energy and then released to power turbines.
-----------UPDATE!-----------
There's actually a remote village on the Donoussa Island in the Aegean Sea, Greece, that is already utilizing solar energy to pump water to an upper reservoir during the day and then running the water through a turbine down to a lower reservoir at night in order to power the village.
You can see the abstract of a paper written about it here.
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