I'm trying to find some stats on this, because flywheel UPS aren't a new idea:
https://www.finning.com/en_IE/products/new/power-systems/ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system#...
In the case where a flywheel is used as a UPS, the rate at which it is spinning will vary in accordance with the stored energy.
Large steam/gas turbines running on the grid have a similar effect. Even without hot gas running through them, they can provide rotational inertia for grid stabilization purposes. This flywheel is basically an extremely heavy version of the same idea, and powered exclusively by the grid itself.
You wont be able to ride out a scenario where there is a long-term lack of generation capacity, but this flywheel could buy the precious seconds/minutes required to spin up peaker plants and other contingencies.
From 2016. Apparently part of the charm of flywheel storage systems is that they're always the first of their kind :)
(I suppose you could argue that the Irish one was the first with batteries and this is the first without, but really I suspect neither are either)
* nothing obvious at https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news * minutes from a 2011 meeting suggest that ESO was talking to Beacon Power at the time: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/sites/eso/files/documents/18... * http://credenceturbine.com/business/flywheel-energy-storage-... mentions Beacon Power providing a frequency regulation flywheel in 2014 for a 20 MW plant * "Techno-Economic Assessment of Energy Storage Technologies for Inertia Response and Frequency Support from Wind Farms" 2020 July 02, https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/13/3421/pdf discusses some details
http://afstrinity.com/company/
I've seen a system meant for hospital ride-through that packed an amazing amount of power into a relatively small enclosure using carbon fiber wound flywheels. For short durations you can get away with this because you're only going to operate one of those. Larger installations would need multiple of those and then you need to get very serious about containment so that if one of the flywheels ever fails it doesn't set off a chain reaction.
The nice thing about the fiber would units is that when they break they self destruct completely within the enclosure. The fiber acts as energy sink by breaking up, as opposed to a steel wheel that will spit out sizeable chunks across fairly larger distances (many meters).
Another player in that market:
https://vyconenergy.com/products/ups/vdc-products/
Grid stabilization is better done using superconductors rather than with flywheels.
Illustrated here in a 1 MW Beacon power system:
https://invidio.us/watch?v=eCtlfj4kMJs
Not all vendor systems incorporate these features, e.g.:
The flywheel disintegrates and turns into a massive spherical weapon of mass distruction?
Like this, but 20x worse?
If it's a 100kw peak electrical machine then it can provide at most 100kw of instantaneous power to the grid while at the same time slowing down by however much is required to deliver that power.
If I understand correctly the idea is a lot like capacitors for DC voltage. The DC voltage has to go down in order for the capacitor to supply current, but the capacitor ensures that the voltage can't go down as quickly as it would otherwise.
https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-012/...
20 years ago, there were a couple companies working on flywheel energy storage for mobile applications. They were using carbon-fiber flywheels, which could spin up to 100K RPM, but were expensive to manufacture. I would have predicted (back then) that carbon-fiber would have won out eventually for infrastructure applications as well, but I guess they were not able to get the costs down sufficiently.
I was thinking more about the fatigue of the shaft.
The rest of the world just builds a dam, creates a new lake, and moves on.
(Yes, if we used more hydro-electric then that would do the job for us, but it's not the case that we need this in order to store energy).
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/forget-elons-batteries-fix-gri...
Flywheels contain tiny amount of energy, but can respond nearly instantaneously To provide frequency regulation on the grid.
Hydro has massive amounts of energy storage (days+ worth of output), but takes a looot longer to respond than flywheels.
I think we will see very little flywheel or dam construction in the coming decades; battery storage is becoming cheap enough that it will hit the non-linear inflection point in deployment in the next few years. First, lots of lithium ion, and likely after that lots of flow batteries.
Balmacaan and Coire Glas are in the planning stages and due to start building soon. There's plenty of high land available.
Your wording implies this is better than the flywheel solution - can you elaborate for a layman?
We have mountains (Wales, Lake District, Scotland), but the likelihood of creating lakes for hydro use is close to zero. And you would need many, many, flywheels to substitute for one lake.
In case anyone's wondering what this is about, in the 1960s the Tryweryn Valley in Wales contained a village (Capel Celyn) which was evacuated and the valley flooded to make a new reservoir to provide water for Liverpool. There's a portion of a nearby wall painted with these words.
UK is an island, and you have highlands. Why not make some salt water lakes there?
We're the size of Michigan with 67 million people.
I can believe it has "new features" but the underlying mechanics of a Syncon are not new. This may just be something good, being over sold by a company with an interest in boosting.
Life gets difficult for this model because the heat induced due to current 'turbulence' and maybe skin effect gets 'stuck' inside the chamber. Fun engineering problems.
Do we really care if the compressors in the air conditioners and the refrigerators turn at a slightly different rate? Okay, maybe a rapid shift in frequency could be damaging, but a slight drift sounds okay mechanically.
Or am I wrong?
The household electric devices or the long term frequency drift are not relevant there, it's about keeping the huge turbines everywhere else running at a stable rate. The other way to achieve rapid compensation for frequency drop is to disconnect consumers, i.e. automatically triggered blackouts.
Traditionally, the inertia of thousands of tons of spinning generator turbines across the system provided this inertia, but with more and more nonlinear sources (and also nonlinear loads), that balance is disappearing.
Flywheels are useful because they store a lot of energy and don't require a lot of energy to keep them spinning (i.e. topped up with energy). Simply connecting them to a generator can be done (relatively) quickly and allows them to supply power for a relatively long period of time. It's basically a mechanical battery.
Both have the advantage that they are cheaper to operate than a typical peaker plant, which is increasingly the role of remaining coal plants that are otherwise too expensive by orders of magnitudes to operate continuously. Switching those on is a last resort for energy companies. The more battery they have, the less need they have for those. And the less they get utilized, the more expensive they are to keep around. Gas plants are better but they take a long time to turn off and on again and doing that is also not cheap.
Prices have actually turned negative a couple of times in e.g. the UK in cases where the power companies were literally paying people to use their excess power just so they could avoid having to turn off plants that are expensive to turn back on. Basically, grid storage capacity allows electricity companies to smooth out peaks in demand and supply and respond extremely rapidly by either soaking up or supplying many GW.
Flywheels store orders of magnitude more power per ton and have very low reaction times (in the order of milliseconds).
This makes them great for frequency control which just means really short term energy storage.
The power grids frequency is directly co-related with the power throughput. If there is too much demand the frequency will drop.
A flywheel can quite easily buffer very short term demands and flatten the somewhat erratic output of wind turbines or solar.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/12/10/watch-a-power-st...
"The power plant was notable for being one of the few that could restart generating electricity without an external power to restart its generators in case of a wide-scale power-outage. This was partly due to cold-war concerns that an attack could take out London power supplies.
To be able to restart the plant, it made use of versions of jet engines based on those used on Concorde to jump start the main generators — and they were used to keep the lights on following the October 1987 storms."
My thought is that the weight of the flywheel matters. To be able to absorb / release a tremendous amount of power, I imagine this flywheel would need to be very heavy. If so, wouldn't it non-linearly differ in efficiency from the near vacuum & magnetic bearing designs we've built before?
Perhaps the proposal is to build a large array of smaller flywheels that don't have to deal with the problem I imagine?
I'm not familiar with any part of engineering here -- just a curious soul -- sincerely asking!
There is still a tonne of carbon used in creation...
In the industry these are known as a "Synchronous Condenser" or Syncom. They have been in use for a long time.
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/04/06/long-read-b...
One problem with the switch to renewable energy is that the mechanical momentum in steam turbines is lost.
This leaves the grid vulnerable to rapid changes in loading.
http://www.execreview.com/2020/07/giant-flywheel-project-in-...
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