Gravity storage: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Gravity storage lifts heavy blocks or weights in towers, mine shafts or buildings and lowers them to generate power. Its cost depends on cheap mass, such as concrete or waste soil, on cranes and winches, and on power price spreads.
No public price Gravity storage has no public monthly price series: Early-stage technology; no market price exists.What its price moves with
Concrete blocks are the usual heavy mass, sometimes made with waste soil or mine tailings to cut cost. Cement is the costly ingredient, so designs try to use as little of it as possible while keeping blocks durable.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Blocks and weights can be filled with sand, gravel or crushed rock, which are cheap and available almost everywhere. Using local fill keeps transport costs down, which matters for such heavy, low-value material.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Towers, frames and winch systems use steel, and mine shaft designs need steel cables and weights. Steel is one of the larger material costs, so its price affects the capital cost of each system.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Motors lift the weights and act as generators when they fall. Efficient motors and drives decide how much of the stored power returns, which makes them central to the economics of gravity storage.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Pumped hydro also stores energy by lifting mass against gravity, only using water. It is the proven benchmark that gravity storage must beat on cost, siting flexibility or speed of building.
No public price for pumped hydro storage, so the link is explained in words only.Cheap LFP batteries are the main competitor for daily storage. Gravity systems promise long life without degradation, but they have struggled to match battery prices in practice, which has limited orders so far.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.