Yup, pretty simple. Build a really, really, really wide jack between the two halves of the Moon. If you want to store energy, you jack them apart. If you want to release energy, you allow them to push back.

Alternatively, just build really tall towers and lift really heavy weights, and let them down when you want your energy back.
-- ihope127, Aug 18 2007

only problem here is that you will have to expend(in an ideal world) exactly the same amount of energy to store the energy as you will get back upon unstoring it. In the real world it will actually cost more energy to store than you get back on release.
-- jhomrighaus, Aug 18 2007


Hence "lunar energy storage" rather than "lunar energy generation". The questions are capacity (which is very large), efficiency (which is questionable), and decay of stored energy (which is ideally very small, but still questionable).
-- ihope127, Aug 18 2007


Perhaps we could consider the moon itself as the heavy weight lifted from the earth, and then extract that energy using...oh, tides or something.
-- ldischler, Aug 18 2007


Tsh, you don't just *jack* apart green cheese. This would allow unwanted bacteria to colonise and then we'd end up with yer basic blue moon.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 18 2007


This idea ignores the small matter a cleaving the moon in tway in the first place, then constructing a suitable divider to keep the halves apart.

[2_fries] You'd have to wedge 2 giant crackers down the middle first then (edit) pry them apart with a crackerjack.
-- marklar, Aug 19 2007


Or drive your car up to the top of a San Francisco hill and leave it there. When you want the energy, attach a winch and let the parking brake off, getting the energy off the spinning winch spool.

Other winchergy options:

- stand atop a tall building. Attach winch to sturdy vent. Hold spool. Jump.

- attach winch to Jack and Jill after the pail of water fetch.

- attach winch to unsuspecting bus rider waiting at the bus stop. Hold spool. Unleash Godzilla.

many other winchergy options.
-- globaltourniquet, Aug 19 2007


It's all well and good to be using a crackerjack but because you didn't bother to clean up the packaging I'm keeping this Coup De Ville I found in the bottom of the box.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 19 2007



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