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pat's peak ski area, New Hampshire....... coolest fly wheel in america..... not sure if it;s still working, but was running like a champ in the late 90's...... somebody must have done some kind of film or article about their fly wheel.
I worked for a coal mine several years ago. The massive dragline that was used for stripping overburden was electric. It used to hit the small local energy grid very hard when it would hoist and swing it's loaded bucket. The mine installed a flywheel to capture the energy from the dragline whenever it lowered it's bucket and the stored energy would buffer the grid when it hoisted. It was a simple and effective solution to protecting the power grid.
@stumpingrimy1686 I'm not sure. I was an engineering intern at the time and I didn't work in the area in charge of it. I was just told about it. My guess is flywheel had been installed years before that. It was the Usibelli Coal Mine in interior Alaska.
Need to be a bit careful though, there is a big difference between variable-speed flywheels used for energy storage, and the (more or less) fixed-speed flywheels used for grid inertia. The AC signal from the former cannot be grid-synchronized so it must go through a number of large electric components to interface to the grid, which severely limits how much instantaneous inertia it can provide to the grid. It really does work more like a battery, including having most of the limitations of a battery. The latter is a grid-synchronized flywheel and these are more or less directly connected to the power lines. Because of that, and because of its mass, it can provide incredible amounts of inertia for relatively short periods of time. But because of its narrow (and slow) RPM range of operation, grid-synchronized flywheels are NOT really long-term energy storage devices and they require a constant energy input to stay within specs. Such a flywheel on its own can only supply inertia for a short period of time before it slows down too much and goes out of spec. Nuclear plants, natural gas plants, and coal plants generally integrate the flywheel into the generator turbine. One can also have standalone flywheels to supply inertia to the grid and to help deal with reactive power that makes it back to the generator. These can more or less be powered by the grid itself, or by alternative energy sources such as wind and solar farms, supplying inertia and smoothing the output, but not really any energy storage. That is, there is no requirement that inertia only come from a fossil fuel plant. Any energy source can supply major inertia by adding a synchronized flywheel. -Matt
In practice both actually do the same thing, they both stabilise the grid by speeding up and slowing down. The only real difference is that the variable-speed flywheels are capable of storing and delivering more power then the fixed speed flywheels but they do need more hardware to function.
I work in power generation industry and have seen detailed reports about turbine rotors deciding to take a look at outside world. Many many tons of mass spinning at 3000rpm can really do some damage if it wants to. They literally go through walls and exit the facility. Kinetic energy is no joke.
@JasonJrake the same reason very large windmills aren't covered like many of the fans in our homes. Once they design it properly with overbuilt redundancy, they don't need to worry about that.
@@veganpotterthevegan most accidents like this are turbine failures inside secure facilities like coal or nuke plants. Companies like to keep that stuff quiet.
The flywheel is a buffer, not for storage but for smoothening. They are used in all ICE cars for this exact reason. Did you saw the guy on TH-cam using a flywheel on his bicycle to capture energy from braking and use that stores energy to propel the bicycle (like in a stopping at a light scenario), really interesting and fun project
Was the solution heavy? I've wondered for some time whether a "mini storage" system for bikes with regenerative brakes used only as support when going uphill would be interesting Not having the weight of a full battery, but avoiding slogging down in the streets by having on demand support
Living in Rural Ontario, Canada, I split loads of wood to heat our home and make maple syrup. So I looked into wood splitters for a long time and most here are hydraulic but they are so slow compared to me with an axe but very powerful and good for tough to split wood. Then I found these flywheel splitters and bought one. It is so fast, so powerful and I compared notes with my neighbour that cuts loads of firewood every year and I am using 1/4 of the gas that he does to split a cord of wood. I never run the engine at full power and it just keeps spinning up these 100 lb weights between splits. It is an excellent use of flywheel technology. Forestwest made the splitter. I got the bigger 34 ton version
The _instantaneous output power_ of a spinning flywheel is HUGE, limited only by the strength of materials. Even a flywheel with tiny _energy storage_ can still generate ENORMOUS torque! But only for a moment.
Beacon Power in Massachusetts began R&D in 1997 into FES systems. Since 2011, Beacon operates 200 flywheels (20 MW) in the mentioned Stephentown, NY facility.
I have a friend whose family owns a machine shop in Stephentown, and joke that their power usage is so dirty the utility had to install one of a kind flywheel, right next door.
@@garycosby1948 Capacity per flywheel is 100 kW. Energy delivered per flywheel is 25 kWh. Discharge time is 15 minutes in this configuration according to the Beacon Power spec sheet of their generation 4 FESS.
Medieval Period: Flywheels were used in medieval mills, particularly water mills and windmills, where they helped to regulate the speed of the grinding stones by smoothing out the power from the variable force of water or wind. Long serving partner
As you said, flywheel systems are great for short term and fast response to grid fluctuations. Or to keep the power on while a generator gets started and stabilized which was something we (very briefly) looked at where I last worked. It was decided that it was much more cost effective to get several dozen battery based UPS systems to keep the gear running until the 200kW generator got going, than it was to install a flywheel system for the entire building.
Indeed. In several airports in Africa, back in the 1960s, when electricity supply was a bit iffy, installed diesel generators for back up. However, those diesel generators were kept spinning (without using fuel) by an electric motor connected to a massive flywheel. When the grid power failed, the diesel fuel was injected and the flywheel had enough momentum to start the diesel generator to keep the runway lights on without interruption.
Flywheels are essential to the stability of any power system, and will continue in that role ad infinitum. There are some variants I've found, both original to me and in the literature, that may enhance their role. All of these variants take advantage of physical phenomena which make the mass moment of inertia of the flywheel a function of its angular speed. I first figured this out in my early years in engineering school (1973-1974) when I worked out the energy stored in the governor used on early steam engines. Whether or not it's obvious to people (it initially wasn't to me), the flyball governor stores virtually all of its energy in a very narrow angular speed range. That's what makes it a good governor. I came up with various means of interposing spring force between the shaft and the flywheel mass that in essence combined the energy storage in elastic strain (a spring) with that of a rotating mass. I called these "sprywheels", and while the models I built worked fine,, the gain in specific energy storage was disappointing. It shouldn't have been surprising, since the specific energy of elastic strain is really small. There have been some efforts I've found in the literature to achieve specific energy storage improvements in flywheels via variable mass moment of inertia, the most promising of which make the mass moment of inertia a function of some phase change phenomenon. The engineers working on it don't really get the whole idea of combining the flywheel phenomenon with other energy storage schema, though, and I certainly wouldn't have taken the same tack. But someone may, someday.
We learned about the oldest versions of these. Old emergency generators used MASSIVE steel wheels for their emergency power system attached to a deiseal engine. Generally they are expensive to start up, but VERY cheap to keep going once they got up to speed. I had always wondered why we never continued to invest and expand in these systems. I think this with the Silica power storage systems that I think you mentioned in a video once upon a time make sense together. In places where Hydro electric is available I can image you could partition off parts of the grid so that black outs from inclement weather. I think a lot of people get hung up on a single answer to our energy deficient problems.... I also think burying these in the ocean is a REALLY good idea. The main problem of what happens if this catastrophically disassembles it's self and the others stationed near it, is neatly dealt with by water's ability to swallow kinetic energy.
I'd note that while it's not at the utility grade level, flywheel power backup has been operating in a large number of datacenters for over a decade, and we've seen it bridge those datacenters commercial power loss to battery, then generator start-up to keep those datacenters live. I've worked in a datacenter w/o such a system, with just battery and generator, and invariably when they do system checks you can tell as all the lights (which are only switched to battery/ups in the case of a power loss, rather than being constantly on those systems, always flicker at the switchover. The workaround most places use is an active UPS, where commercial power charges the batteries, and an inverter provides power to the facility off of those batteries. Even that can have delivered power fluctuations as the commercial power if floating the batteries at just above their fully charged voltage, and the inverters may not respond fast enough to the change in voltage from the battery side. That may not affect your PC or laptop, but there are still a large number of systems where that level of power change can be a serious issue. So yes, it's good to see that the utility grade stuff is spinning up. I do suspect that in the not too distant future, businesses are going to be asked if they have their own backup and standby power, and where they do, they may be moved into a power shedding level of service, where during high load, if the business isn't sending power to the grid, they may be dropped off the grid until the grid can support their load as well again. Similar to the 70's and 80's where some varieties of home service were managed to shut down the load during extreme cold or heat events. This mostly didn't involve dropping power to the home or business, it simply involved deactivating specific equipment and loads within the customer's environment. However if your place has a full backup power infrastructure, I can see that not being an option. On the other hand it's also going to surprise a few people if they have a generator that runs on natural gas, and they are not prepared for the cost of the natural gas consumption.
The future of energy is an abundance, as long as we make sure to utilities V2G and not let utilities dictate all the rules (and control more power and money). Everyone will be driving around with excess energy. Utilize that when plugging in at work and the grid will be much more resilient. It also allows to use more renewable energy. I don't see utilities controlling business power usage like you say in the future.
always impressed by your videos, they are very polished and have a nice flow of information. big fan of what you do and hope you continue to research and inform the rest of us
Amazing, I think an investment is easier with proper guidance, especially from a financial advisor...it helps reduce the chances of running into losses. All thanks to this same Larry Marshall who made it possible and I was able to pay off my mortgage.,
I've also earned over 450k so far investing in a crypto market with the guidance of this same Larry Marshall services, so surprised I found people talking about him here, Good man.
Power companies need to generate more power than needed as a buffer to accommodate instantaneous spikes in usage. Flywheels' "instant output" capability lets them maintain a smaller buffer and thus save $. This long-term cost advantage is why they make a good investment.
The "instant spikes" people keep referencing are not in measured in milliseconds, they come over seconds to minutes, as people cycle air conditioning, solar, or wind, because of cloud cover or industrial shift-work. Renewables are not as 'unstable' as everyone seems to want to say.
I have this discouraging suspicion that the CEO's kid needs a new yacht because the last one is 2 years old, therefore the board won't vote for spending on improvements like this. However, I agree with you, it needs to happen.
@@MichaelRussell3000 True, only "instantaneous" compared to the time it takes to get additional steam pressure to a turbine. A coal plant operator told me that it takes 24 hours to go from cold start to full power. How many minutes to ramp a gas fired plant up from 50% to 100?
@MichaelRussell3000 So many people think off the potential downfalls always say this like "You gotta be careful" then go into speel people should think more like give it a try we don't need a one shoe fits all it doesn't always have too be the best option every option comes with pros n cons short term and long term and every system can be adapted and improved people should focuse on mixing systems more n trying new idea n not focusing on the one grid have back up local systems storage batts are not hard too make and nor are batteries there's littarally unlimited designs...there's alot off restrictions in energy world due too profit margins because something too good would make no money and or if simple n effective people could make themselves...cheers
Hey Matt, At one of my past jobs we deployed flywheel storage, vacuum containment and magnetic bearings, can't remember rpm but I seem to remember it being north of 10k rpm, maybe 20k? This was for a heavy load telecom facility. First we deployed 4 MW along side a new expansion (conversion of an office building to datecenter), then later migration of the existing facilities on site to another 4 MW. We weren't using them as primary backup power, instead they were ONLY used for UPS failover during MW genset startup. We went with flywheel as the maintenance and footprint was drastically smaller than the lead-acid traditional batteries in that role, and they didn't want newer battery tech as the 2nd floor was still office, and fire was a concern. The deployment architecture was we had containerized sleds for ease of transport, site prep, and future replaceability. Each sled was a matched set of a 1 MW genset, flywheel, and a small bank of lead acid for genset startup. Again, all the flywheels did was maintain that MW load during a grid failure until the genset spun up and sync'd. Otherwise they just sat there, spinning, waiting.... As far as I know, we were the first flywheel deployment at this particular nationwide telecom, and the architecture became a standard for other facilities. (The nature of our facility was to showcase next gen tech and perform tech and integration test in a simulated large scale live network. Lots of fun projects like this. (We also showcased an ambient air exchange cooling for data center pods, no cfc or even water involved, just massive air movement.) Fun to see flywheel getting some attention!
Energy storage? Probably not. Energy management? Seems likely. Handling output differentials, redirecting energy across larger interconnected grids, seems reasonable to implement them for some advantages they have. Storage won't be one of those.
They are valid storage methods. Just cannot store energy for as long as batteries or dams can. In a way it's similar to electrolytic hydrogen since it dissipates out of tanks over time.
But you can do all of that either with traditional syncons or with grid-forming inverters attached to a battery farm. The latter is increasingly taking over from syncons in my country as coal plants close and the battery farms are built - they're cheaper, more efficient and lower maintenance than traditional syncons, and a LOT cheaper than these things that need failure-prone vacuum chambers and expensive extreme precision. High speed flywheels do have their round-trip efficiency going for them, but that is not enough to offset their big economic disadvantages.
@@kenoliver8913 batteries being cheap are at the mercy of geopolitical stability sadly having a diverse portfolio of technologies is always beneficial I think
Just the losses alone make it not worth it for energy storage. You have to continually pump power into it, but you always lose some percentage of the energy you pump in, along with a percentage of the energy you pump out, and that's just on the mechanical side of things. Turn to the electrical side of things, where you need to convert things, both when energy is applied and taken out, and you're looking at more like a base loss of at least 40% of all energy that goes through them. That's also before you start adding even more losses, like transmission over distance losses. Even directly from a power plant, 66% of ALL power is lost before it even makes it to a wall plug. Then you have conversion losses in electronics. People would be shocked if they realized just how inefficient the energy grid actually is, to the point that gasoline actually yields greater energy. That's why they made gas soo expensive, because when gas was $1 a gallon, it was literally cheaper to run your house on a gas generator than to use the grid. As electricity became more and more expensive, they had to jack up the price of gasoline, because they knew people would eventually realize that they could just buy a gas generator and power their home for cheaper, and they couldn't have that, because it would destroy the grid, so in order to keep the grid going (and people paying the greedily high prices), they had to make sure all alternatives were too expensive to compete. That's the true reality of our world. You're not paying more for gas because it's bad for the environment, you're paying more because the energy grid couldn't compete with gas generators.
This could change with improving technology, but yes they seem to be most useful in smoothing out the intraday power fluctuations. For which they are definitely very useful.
This is a useful technology as a giant capacitor, but it is also a bit silly as a storage solution. What we're doing in Norway is building a smart-grid. This will allow us to sell energy on a kilowatt-second basis. So when there's a lot of energy available, that can be dumped directly into people's hot water for later consumption. Funnily, hot water is a solid state battery and the existing storage capacity is extremely enormous. As more Norwegian houses are heated with hot water, the capacity will also increase dramatically. All it really needs is a $5 smart-plug and a software service. But the opposite would work equally well in hot countries, where you could dump coldness (kiss) into the water to store energy and then using water cooling when you want to get rid of indoor heat.
This is a one way system. Converting back to electricity would be very ineffective. With the price we have on electricity the cost for single homes make it unpractical most places. You need system like the have in Denmark that supply the whole local area.
About 2002, I was working in the SAVVIS datacenter in Tukwila Washington. We had a ~1MW flywheel systems. It was from a company in Switzerland but I forget the name now off the top of my head. The system had about a 3 or 4 minute energy retention capacity which was basically plenty of time to start the backup generators which were maintained in hot standby mode (oil was hot, coolant was hot, etc) so that they could come online at operating speed with almost no delay. It was super cool and worked great.
I would say these would be very useful on a neighborhood scale. There are frequent small power outages in Texas and this seems like it would make more sense to install rather than each house getting their own generator.
Taxas's issues are far more fundamental than the neighborhood scale. This would be a sticking plaster. Texas needs to smooth its power supply by collecting up the neighboring states, surely.
This is worse energy storage than biodiesel (which can be as simple as animal fat). Just get (or build, they can be made from garbage) a stirling generator and use biodiesel, these things can run off chickenshit fire if you run out of alternatives.
@@custos3249 simple frost? first time it stayed below freezing for 2 weeks straight in hundreds of years, AND it took a ton of bad maintenance and negligent cheapness to actually make it a problem. the grid wasnt the issue with that just like the grid wasnt the issue with fukishima.
Personal systems. Wind generation has big overspin issues here, making the need for brakes and major power burn off. Combine fess storage as a direct and or electrical drive, using some form of disengagement for no wind times. Seems that would work in place of the brake as well as storing energy. May not be feasible but worth a thought or two.
Bit like a resistive dump-load common with wind turbines, I guess - just a bit more useful than producing heat to bleed off excess generation and keeping the blade spin in spec.
Not sure if it's just me but the PowerPoint style title pages and noises take away from the video. The rest is flawless and flows really well. Keep up the great work Matt
Little Barford Power Station in the UK is a CCGT (Closed Circuit Gas Turbine power station). Powered by gas. In 2016 or some near year Little Barford had a lightening Strike on a Pylon opposite our house in Roxton, and it failed taking the whole grid down. It took many hours of no electricity before the grid was stable again. The grid was put back on very carefully in chunks across the UK. Electric Trains got stuck as the frequency dropped outside their ranges.
@@leggysoft The MIT Professor Don Sadoway who developed the grid level dirt cheap long life stable battery tech .... does a great talk on the problems of grid Frequency control and stabilisation in terms of historic grid management using just generators.
CCGT stands for Closed Cycle Gas Turbine. Basically you use the hot gas coming out of the turbine's exhaust to make steam and drive a steam turbine - bulky, expensive to build and (like all steam turbines) hard to ramp up and down but much more fuel efficient than an OCGT (Open Cycle GT).
Nit Pick Mode on!. at 5:34, did you mean The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (entropy in a closed system always increases)? This seems more appropriate for the context than Newton's First Law.
Came here for this. Newton's First Law is the law of inertia, which says that moving things tend to keep moving. He's trying to say that the wheel will slow down, the exact opposite of what N1L says. I agree that the 2nd Law of Thermo is a more appropriate justification for inefficiency.
Sounds like a great idea! One idea that occurs to me: tiered use. Assuming you can extract energy from each unit independently (which I'm sure you can set up in a facility if you want to) you could presumably use your array of FESS's to maintain a subset of them for longer. Not ideal for efficiency - you'd only want to do this if you wanted to rig up longer term storage while not using battery tech (which might be useful in some places, given the cost of battery chemicals vs the cost of a big hunk of metal) but if you needed to, you could draw down the energy from FESS A to keep B through E spinning until it runs out, then draw on B to keep C-E done, then tap C for D-E, and then D for E. There's definitely a point at which the efficiency problem kills this chain, but it could extend a flywheel's operation cycle up to 24 hours to work with a solar plant for sure. Like I said, efficiency of transfer of energy is the killer here, this isn't a trick for long term extension of flywheels to make them a super-ideal thing..just a trick that would allow a FESS system to hold onto power longer than it might otherwise. (And I'm sure there's probably systems that have looked into doing this and are doing it if it's actually feasible.)
Before reliable battery systems were available fly wheel ‘no break generators’ were used to maintain electrical power to critical systems in the event of a power cut. I worked at and airport where the radar equipment was powered by a generator powered by an electric motor, between them was a large spinning concrete disc. When the power went off the generator continued to provide power for the few seconds it took for the diesel generator to start. This system was cheaper than having the radar powered from a diesel generator continuously. I assume the same sort of systems would use a continuously charging battery now, connected to an inverter. The flywheel system worked well back then (late ‘70s) as lead acid batteries need a lot of maintenance, plus we needed a.c. for the radar systems. I don’t think inverters, other than dc motors driving an alternator existed.
Speed carries more energy than mass. The formula is something with Speed^2 . The limiting factor is the tensile strength, and carbon fiber is stronger than steel. Some flywheels have exploded when a crack came in the spoke
Carbon fiber dries out overtime and becomes brittle. It's designed obsolescence. It's how green energy is manufactured, sell the governments the line that it's advanced technology and then deliver them the tech while keeping them on the hook for repair and maintenance to make the profit. Tell the public it's good for the environment when in reality it's worse. The laws of physics state that the world is in a state of entropy, meaning more and more work is required to complete the same objective. More money is needed for projects. More labor is needed for projects. Project results will continue to diminish. That is why the projects are always bigger with more funding and more labor. The world is dying, and only Jesus can save it.
A lot of the arguments around which tech to use in renewable power feels like it could be solved with the "Oh neat, two cakes" argument. Surely implementing as many of these as possible is the answer. We've been arguing about which one to use so much that we're closing in on a very nasty deadline without having a set plan. At least if we scatter shot as many as possible, gravity batteries, flywheels, modular nuclear reactors, hydro batteries etc we can extend the deadline. We dont need the number one ideal confirmed solution right away, we just need something and we need it fast
@@Jueyes-vg2gb What do you mean when you say there isn't a deadline? Given that you don't explain it, I suspect it might be just a joy of anonymously trolling with faith-based, ideological thinking instead of logic. And I can understand why one wouldn't be public about denying the painfully obvious outside of the KoolAid drinking tribe.
I think the best analogous thing to this is like a capacitor or inductor coil. It heavily resists fluctuations in power. Both are used in small electronics to smooth out voltage supplies and prevent spikes from damaging components. They're not a battery, but they do have a significant roll to play in the grid system by smoothing out high demand that a battery can't do.
Quebec had a nuclear reactor located about halfway between the two major load centres (Quebec City and Montreal). A benefit was that the inertia of the generator (which ran pretty much 100% output) was line stability as consumption changed on the line. The massive generator's inertia helped regulate voltage and phase change while also (of course) putting power on the system. Due to refurbishment costs the utility decided to shut it down. Recently the question of refurbing it came up again, but that seems to have died out. 15 minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but it's valuable in the late afternoon when load goes up quickly over the course of about 2 hours. So dump the power a couple wheels at a time as fits the system.
I think you conflated two ideas: 1. Flywheels for energy storage, in which case the rotational speed will vary as it charges and discharges and all that it offers is a source of power, or 2. Flywheels for frequency stabilisation, in which case the rotational speed is tied to grid frequency and essentially constant. You cannot do both at the same time. It is probably expensive to build a system that can operate in either mode as the latter needs a synchronous motor and the former needs a more conventional motor.
Frequency stability is not a problem. Fluctuation in the frequency are a way to help voltage / power stability on the very short time. Just spinning turbines (e.g. in steam based power plants) act as some fly wheel stabilitzation, though usually with not much active control and limited effect. An efficient flywheel storage would need a variable speed and some variable motor / generator. This can be via an intermediate DC step and electronics, or with syncrohnous generator with low frequency AC excitation - the AC excitation can adjust the frequency with less power from an electronic inverter. This technique is also frequently used with wind turbines to use them with variable speed and saving on the power of the electronic inverter.
There were some data centers that used flywheels instead of battery to carry critical load until the diesel generators fired up. I think the maintenance cost became very difficult. Replacing the flywheel itself is super expensive and the same battery capacity became cheap. The spinning of that big of a mass is going to generate friction no matter what and preventing that in a mission critical environment is 😬
both dinglun and moneypoint had a written "MW" on screen but for the latter, you said MWh which is a completely different thing. when talking about energy storage, plain power figure only tells you about maximum momentary power and nothing about amount of energy stored (i think both have chemical batteries too). so which is it?
Ultimately you're wanting 50Hz / 60Hz (depending on the country you live in), I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't just rectify whatever high frequency AC is coming out of the flywheel to DC and then use an inverter to convert it back to 3 phase AC for sync and frequency. Frequency and phase matching is incredibly important to prevent failures at generation sites or loads. A generation site can get disconnected if phase and frequency aren't closely matched to the load in order to prevent damage, but if a generation site (or sites) are disconnected, the remaining connected sites are now under more load, and that causes them to get further out of sync, exacerbating the problem, which leads to wide spread failures unless the load can be shed (ie forced blackouts), or more generation can step in at phase and frequency, and return everything to normal. If every generation site is knocked out, that leads to a 'black start', which is pretty complicated to recover from as something needs to provide the clock (or frequency) that sites are synchronised to, and it also requires bringing the areas disconnected on in stages to prevent everything from rapidly falling out of step again. Or, we could just install (more?) nuclear and avoid the complication of storage atop synchronisation, at least until the fusion nut is cracked. In my mind, flywheels are a good solution for sites to have something to provide power while diesel generators come online in case of a blackout, and this is exactly how several datacentres I worked at did things (and that was old tech 20 years ago), but trying to make this small scale solution fit for large scale seems like elimating the problem with more reliable generation to start with is smarter. The turbine at a nuclear/coal/gas plant will have an integrated flywheel rotating at the same speed as the turbine/generator to smooth out sudden changes in load, and permit a bit of time to change how much heat the fuel produces and is centuries old tech. An unpopular opinion, I know, but I see these products as being useful only in specific scenarios, at large scale it seems like a waste of resources.
Flywheels inability to hold energy for any significant length of time is their biggest barrier as oftentimes the time between excess renewables and insufficient is hours and flywheels short dispatch time make them a hard to reccomend candidate for energy storage. Especially since Li-ion batteries can do the same thing to a greater degree
And Lithium chemistry batteries are constantly improving in charge speed. An individual battery might never be able to provide the near instantaneous response of a flywheel in terms of an energy dump or source - but multiple batteries might.
If there is anything more dangerous than a facilty full of giant 50k rpm flywheels, it's a facility with an array of lithium batteries of equal output. One mishap anywhere would turn the place into an environmental nightmare coupled with a spectacular weeklong fireball. Lithium batteries would do a better job but at a much higher risk and expense.
@@Ichibuns Yes, one worse would be an above ground flywheel in a lithium battery storage place where the flywheel spins out and destroys the lithium batteries in a huge fireball of a spinning wheel out of control. For that reason alone the best would be an in ground flywheel to level loads of the battery bank. In a failure the ground could absorb the abuse and contain the flywheel.
@@Ichibuns LFP batteries which are the predominantly used batteries in utility scale battery storage are less prone to thermal runaway than other battery chemistries and the way that battery farms are built make it so that it is less likely for the whole farm to catch fire if one container has an issue
When you see how the shift to green is and has to be multiple systems patching each other's short comings, it's kind of amazing we got this far with dirtier energies as the primary option.
Flywheel for emergency power to bridge the gap between power supply failure during backup generating equipment startup. I've seen one on a large industrial facility. Always spinning just incase. Coupled to a few thousand HP diesel generator, critical system power. Awesome engineering.
@@jb007gd Yes they are. They do not have the public resistance to change in a system like theirs. The science says these are the facts and the government moves to implement no matter what the public thinks.
Is the Dinglun station 30MW or 30MWh? You used MW units, not MWh, and then said that the Torus + Gardner Group system would provide 26MWh and that this approaches the capacity of the Dinglun system.
@@amdreallyfast Not providing the amount of time it can supply the 30 MW is a serious miss. Matt may have been quoting the Energy Storage News article which also did not mention the time component. A single AA battery can provide 30 MW, but probably only for an insignificant attosecond.
@@amdreallyfast MW is a measure of energy per second, while (counterintuitively) MWh is a measure for the amount of energy, so the capability of a plant is measured in MW, while the amount or stored energy is measured in MWh. The unit breakdown is: M: prefix for a Million, 10^6 W: watt = J/s, Joules per second, which is energy over time h: hour, which is time Watt-hour means energy over time, times time: ((J/s) * h). The time cancels out, while the energy, measured in Joules, is left as the only unit.** **multiplied by a 3600 coefficient as there are 3600 seconds in an hour
@@oraziovescovi1922 Yeah, but that doesn't then explain how much power the plant can actually hold. Only how much it can output. If it has 30 mw/s of energy storage, that's pitiful in comparison to 30 mw/h's. Not to mention that even 30 mw/h's seem a bit low.
Great article, I had never heard of Flywheel Storage before, as you say it's perfect for steadying out power stations. We need some here in Australia as talk is that rooftop is going to be throttled back or blocked, crazy....
@@charlesgates9814 You don't find many rivers or reservoirs on top of mountains. Dams are built where the water is. Which is on the rivers at the BOTTOM of the hills. That is also coincidentally where people build communities - on the rivers where there's a water supply. You pump the water UP to the higher water level behind the DAM. You let the water out to fall DOWN through the dam's turbines to get the power back. That's how reservoirs work for energy storage.
The concept of mechanical energy storage is interesting, and flywheels are an interesting concept. For many applications though, I think gravity-based mechanical energy storage is perhaps more feasible for long-term storage.
Nice video thank you. I remember reading about Porsche testing a flywheel system in a 911 race car many years ago. You can reinvent the wheel after all.
The first "large-scale" commercial flywheel energy storage system in China has been deployed in the rail transit system. During deceleration, the subway can recover and store braking energy through the flywheel, and during acceleration, it can release this energy. This approach helps reduce the impact on the power grid. Additionally, this flywheel energy storage system is well-suited to the frequent start-and-stop nature of subway operations, fully leveraging its advantages of rapid response, high charge-discharge efficiency, and short charging time, while avoiding the limitation of the flywheel system's inability to store energy for long durations. If I recall correctly, the power rating of this flywheel energy storage system is approximately 10MW.
I've installed Vycon flywheels on UPS systems. They require more upkeep than batteries, but they last longer. Main benefit was to get around local fire regulations limiting size of battery installations.
The company I work for has some bleeding edge IP in this field. We have the tech for a 150kRPM flywheel with nearly zero eddy current losses. It's a fantastic system. It does use a vacuum sealed chamber and a combination ruby and magnetic bearing.
My big question is how long the switching circuitry will last. Probably a pretty wild inverter circuit running these things. Really impressive coulombic efficiency though
I think one can reasonably expect the inverter durability to be comparable to an EV, assuming adequate cooling, because they use EV powertrains. Luckily, the inverter is one of the more easily replaceable components of a FESS.
Flywheels are used in virtually every piston operated internal combustion engine to smooth out the jerkyness of the combustion cycle. Different flywheels are used in different applications. A sports car or race car may have a lighter flywheel to improve responsiveness and allow for higher revs while trucks will usually have a heavier one for retaining torque. The flywheel is geared allowing the starter to drive it, thus it serves a dual purpose. All that said, finding them in other applications is fascinating.
I was just thinking hybrid storage makes a lot of sense using flywheel, battery and solar panels for small grid applications. And then you mentioned it as being done now. Things just keep getting better and better as we learn more.
Wonder when someone will come up with a micro nuclear plant attached to a flywheel for home power without grid? Heinlein's idea of the "shipstone company" without mentioning nuclear power or flywheels. He saw that coming in the 1930s and 1840s. Essentially a sealed unit that lasted about twenty years or more. Hope someone somewhere is working on it. Imagine how that could solve the issue of large truck power for moving goods and single home use for remote landscape use.
9:40 according to "the internet" Together, the flywheel and the synchronous condenser have an inertia of 4,000 megawatt-seconds. The 160 MWh figure may be the total energy in the spinning, but only a small fraction of that can be used in this configuration (frequency stabilisation).
Wind turbines already are flywheels and per this vid a lot bigger than the storage flywheels, and they do already work with momentum. So, they could simply be conceptualized to also work as storage flywheels. When there is no wind, which is when you would need storage, and, even with wind, you could feed solar energy to make them rotate at higher rate and store additional energy without (presumably) affecting their efficiency much. When there is no wind, the blades already are rotatable so just move them to vertical position so the momentum can be maintained without creating wind drag But I guess the problem is the battery flywheels spin at much higher speeds, so you'd have to add a planetary gear or transmission introducing more mechanical parts, to also increase the turbine speed, and both high speeds and gears would reduce longevity.
Have you seen those gravity/buoyancy based energy storage solutions? Those seem better to me - you can keep stacking concrete blocks or lowering balloons underwater to store the energy, and then when you want to generate, you hook a generator to a line and let the balloon or block go and the line unravels and spins the generator. Seems safer than a spinning death machine, and gravity and buoyancy don't lose energy over time.
A flywheel going several Kilometers through a forest felling trees, is what happened in Bavaria/ Germany. Some flywheel they used there to power the magnetic field of a Tokamak just broke(free)...
There used to be a TV show called "spin city." I never watched it. But I have thought about putting an entire city onto a turntable for energy storage. Quite the deal, huh? Think of the ramifications... The centrifugal force, sunrise and sunset, driving to and from the city, having a ball game in a city park! Bowling at a city bowling alley! What would trees look like? Not sure about the depth or rotational speed of this city.
In the seventies I was shown an huge and at that time seemingly ancient flywheel that was used as a power filter. Power in went to the motor. On the other side a generator was constantly running. The result was stable power without voltage spikes.
It's called a syncon (synchronous converter) and an important part of any large grid. Though usually replaced by solid-state electronics these days. Look it up.
Flywheels are great where they are great, but that's not in most use cases. Audi used flywheels instead of batteries on LeMans winning cars, I've used them as power backup for a server farm, manufacturing plants use them to stabilize heavy machines from fluctuations.
I remember back in the mid 2000's when the company I worked for were looking at changing the UPS for the server room, one of the options that was mentioned was a flywheel based UPS. Sadly, we went with traditional lead acid batteries. Would've loved to try something different tho.
This is perfect for grid stabilization for the small scale regulation that happens several times a minute. These can be charged and recharged almost an endless amount of times.
Imagine Earth is inundated with flywheel stations, then suddenly they all stopped/slowed down at the same time. "Breaking News: Earth shifted another 3" due to humans. "
One place flywheels could be an obvious fit: in conversion from DC solar power to grid-tied, frequency-matched AC. If the flywheel already needs to do frequency matching, you can use solar to spin up the flywheel with essentially no conversion (using a DC motor) and then use the flywheel itself to convert to AC. (You'd need enough flywheels and for their DC inputs to be out-of-phase so that the PWM-based motor speed control is sending those pulses to different motors at different times to maximize energy consumption, though a capacitor bank can smooth some of that over...) A lot of these techs benefit from being deployed together for efficiency gains like this.
This can't work. The flywheel does not spin at a constant speed - it is constantly variable with the energy stored. Solid state inverters are far more efficient than any kind of motor/alternator configuration for AC generation.
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How can we count the puns!! Great job.
I love glazing Chinese inflated data and bullshit statistics
Should we pay to not be doxed or should we dox every person in that company?
How many puns can you pack into one video?
pat's peak ski area, New Hampshire....... coolest fly wheel in america..... not sure if it;s still working, but was running like a champ in the late 90's...... somebody must have done some kind of film or article about their fly wheel.
I worked for a coal mine several years ago. The massive dragline that was used for stripping overburden was electric. It used to hit the small local energy grid very hard when it would hoist and swing it's loaded bucket. The mine installed a flywheel to capture the energy from the dragline whenever it lowered it's bucket and the stored energy would buffer the grid when it hoisted. It was a simple and effective solution to protecting the power grid.
that's cool. was it solely mechanical?
@stumpingrimy1686 I'm not sure. I was an engineering intern at the time and I didn't work in the area in charge of it. I was just told about it. My guess is flywheel had been installed years before that. It was the Usibelli Coal Mine in interior Alaska.
Need to be a bit careful though, there is a big difference between variable-speed flywheels used for energy storage, and the (more or less) fixed-speed flywheels used for grid inertia.
The AC signal from the former cannot be grid-synchronized so it must go through a number of large electric components to interface to the grid, which severely limits how much instantaneous inertia it can provide to the grid. It really does work more like a battery, including having most of the limitations of a battery.
The latter is a grid-synchronized flywheel and these are more or less directly connected to the power lines. Because of that, and because of its mass, it can provide incredible amounts of inertia for relatively short periods of time. But because of its narrow (and slow) RPM range of operation, grid-synchronized flywheels are NOT really long-term energy storage devices and they require a constant energy input to stay within specs. Such a flywheel on its own can only supply inertia for a short period of time before it slows down too much and goes out of spec.
Nuclear plants, natural gas plants, and coal plants generally integrate the flywheel into the generator turbine.
One can also have standalone flywheels to supply inertia to the grid and to help deal with reactive power that makes it back to the generator. These can more or less be powered by the grid itself, or by alternative energy sources such as wind and solar farms, supplying inertia and smoothing the output, but not really any energy storage.
That is, there is no requirement that inertia only come from a fossil fuel plant. Any energy source can supply major inertia by adding a synchronized flywheel.
-Matt
Yeah, was going to make the same comment. A bit loose with the facts there, that early in the video.... 😕
Thanks for commenting this. I was a bit confused, as what he said didn't fit with what I knew, but I am no expert.
I didn't want to write a comment, but I was a bit disoriented about these two slightly different functioning systems. Thank you for mentioning it.
In practice both actually do the same thing, they both stabilise the grid by speeding up and slowing down.
The only real difference is that the variable-speed flywheels are capable of storing and delivering more power then the fixed speed flywheels but they do need more hardware to function.
Yeah, it really decreased my amount of trust to that channel. It looks like very basic, yet important mistake from channel like that.
I work in power generation industry and have seen detailed reports about turbine rotors deciding to take a look at outside world. Many many tons of mass spinning at 3000rpm can really do some damage if it wants to. They literally go through walls and exit the facility. Kinetic energy is no joke.
@DzeiEidz none have been bad enough to make the general news. Can't say the same about other power generation systems
Why aren’t they all placed in holes for safety?
@JasonJrake the same reason very large windmills aren't covered like many of the fans in our homes. Once they design it properly with overbuilt redundancy, they don't need to worry about that.
Pinball of DOOM!!!
@@veganpotterthevegan most accidents like this are turbine failures inside secure facilities like coal or nuke plants. Companies like to keep that stuff quiet.
The flywheel puns are out of control
They've /spun/ out of control..
Unlike the flywheels themselves, that are very controlled.
Spinning out of control
They are flying all over the place.
Just when you think they are gone, here they come round again.
The flywheel is a buffer, not for storage but for smoothening. They are used in all ICE cars for this exact reason. Did you saw the guy on TH-cam using a flywheel on his bicycle to capture energy from braking and use that stores energy to propel the bicycle (like in a stopping at a light scenario), really interesting and fun project
Was the solution heavy?
I've wondered for some time whether a "mini storage" system for bikes with regenerative brakes used only as support when going uphill would be interesting
Not having the weight of a full battery, but avoiding slogging down in the streets by having on demand support
@@drillerdev4624 5.5kg, 15% efficiency.
I saw that video. Lmao.
"smoothening"?
Living in Rural Ontario, Canada, I split loads of wood to heat our home and make maple syrup. So I looked into wood splitters for a long time and most here are hydraulic but they are so slow compared to me with an axe but very powerful and good for tough to split wood. Then I found these flywheel splitters and bought one. It is so fast, so powerful and I compared notes with my neighbour that cuts loads of firewood every year and I am using 1/4 of the gas that he does to split a cord of wood. I never run the engine at full power and it just keeps spinning up these 100 lb weights between splits. It is an excellent use of flywheel technology. Forestwest made the splitter. I got the bigger 34 ton version
There are other brands out there under "kinetic" splitters. And they are good at what they do. Some are not good for all woods and sizes though.
I never knew about these, extremely cool!
The _instantaneous output power_ of a spinning flywheel is HUGE, limited only by the strength of materials. Even a flywheel with tiny _energy storage_ can still generate ENORMOUS torque! But only for a moment.
Beacon Power in Massachusetts began R&D in 1997 into FES systems. Since 2011, Beacon operates 200 flywheels (20 MW) in the mentioned Stephentown, NY facility.
I have a friend whose family owns a machine shop in Stephentown, and joke that their power usage is so dirty the utility had to install one of a kind flywheel, right next door.
How many MWh? Do you understand the difference between MW and MWh?
self-dischargeg rate nd turn around efficiency pls
@@garycosby1948 Capacity per flywheel is 100 kW. Energy delivered per flywheel is 25 kWh. Discharge time is 15 minutes in this configuration according to the Beacon Power spec sheet of their generation 4 FESS.
Medieval Period:
Flywheels were used in medieval mills, particularly water mills and windmills, where they helped to regulate the speed of the grinding stones by smoothing out the power from the variable force of water or wind.
Long serving partner
Absolutely. True today for a lot of systems including your car.
"Stronger than a thousand men" Great book on waterwheel history. Overshot water wheels were their own flywheel.
As you said, flywheel systems are great for short term and fast response to grid fluctuations. Or to keep the power on while a generator gets started and stabilized which was something we (very briefly) looked at where I last worked. It was decided that it was much more cost effective to get several dozen battery based UPS systems to keep the gear running until the 200kW generator got going, than it was to install a flywheel system for the entire building.
Indeed. In several airports in Africa, back in the 1960s, when electricity supply was a bit iffy, installed diesel generators for back up. However, those diesel generators were kept spinning (without using fuel) by an electric motor connected to a massive flywheel. When the grid power failed, the diesel fuel was injected and the flywheel had enough momentum to start the diesel generator to keep the runway lights on without interruption.
"There's been a lot of movement with flywheels since then" I see what you did there Sir.
I think you're just putting a spin on it!
Nice catch sometimes these puns just fly by.
They certainly seem to be gaining momentum...
I think I may have to go lie down now.
@@Michael_Haddad how about "use of flywheels is really picking up speed"?
There's no showing this roll 😂
Flywheels are essential to the stability of any power system, and will continue in that role ad infinitum. There are some variants I've found, both original to me and in the literature, that may enhance their role. All of these variants take advantage of physical phenomena which make the mass moment of inertia of the flywheel a function of its angular speed. I first figured this out in my early years in engineering school (1973-1974) when I worked out the energy stored in the governor used on early steam engines. Whether or not it's obvious to people (it initially wasn't to me), the flyball governor stores virtually all of its energy in a very narrow angular speed range. That's what makes it a good governor. I came up with various means of interposing spring force between the shaft and the flywheel mass that in essence combined the energy storage in elastic strain (a spring) with that of a rotating mass. I called these "sprywheels", and while the models I built worked fine,, the gain in specific energy storage was disappointing. It shouldn't have been surprising, since the specific energy of elastic strain is really small. There have been some efforts I've found in the literature to achieve specific energy storage improvements in flywheels via variable mass moment of inertia, the most promising of which make the mass moment of inertia a function of some phase change phenomenon. The engineers working on it don't really get the whole idea of combining the flywheel phenomenon with other energy storage schema, though, and I certainly wouldn't have taken the same tack. But someone may, someday.
Makes me wonder if springs in torsion can store more energy than in tension.
We learned about the oldest versions of these.
Old emergency generators used MASSIVE steel wheels for their emergency power system attached to a deiseal engine. Generally they are expensive to start up, but VERY cheap to keep going once they got up to speed. I had always wondered why we never continued to invest and expand in these systems.
I think this with the Silica power storage systems that I think you mentioned in a video once upon a time make sense together. In places where Hydro electric is available I can image you could partition off parts of the grid so that black outs from inclement weather.
I think a lot of people get hung up on a single answer to our energy deficient problems.... I also think burying these in the ocean is a REALLY good idea. The main problem of what happens if this catastrophically disassembles it's self and the others stationed near it, is neatly dealt with by water's ability to swallow kinetic energy.
I'd note that while it's not at the utility grade level, flywheel power backup has been operating in a large number of datacenters for over a decade, and we've seen it bridge those datacenters commercial power loss to battery, then generator start-up to keep those datacenters live. I've worked in a datacenter w/o such a system, with just battery and generator, and invariably when they do system checks you can tell as all the lights (which are only switched to battery/ups in the case of a power loss, rather than being constantly on those systems, always flicker at the switchover. The workaround most places use is an active UPS, where commercial power charges the batteries, and an inverter provides power to the facility off of those batteries. Even that can have delivered power fluctuations as the commercial power if floating the batteries at just above their fully charged voltage, and the inverters may not respond fast enough to the change in voltage from the battery side. That may not affect your PC or laptop, but there are still a large number of systems where that level of power change can be a serious issue.
So yes, it's good to see that the utility grade stuff is spinning up.
I do suspect that in the not too distant future, businesses are going to be asked if they have their own backup and standby power, and where they do, they may be moved into a power shedding level of service, where during high load, if the business isn't sending power to the grid, they may be dropped off the grid until the grid can support their load as well again. Similar to the 70's and 80's where some varieties of home service were managed to shut down the load during extreme cold or heat events. This mostly didn't involve dropping power to the home or business, it simply involved deactivating specific equipment and loads within the customer's environment. However if your place has a full backup power infrastructure, I can see that not being an option. On the other hand it's also going to surprise a few people if they have a generator that runs on natural gas, and they are not prepared for the cost of the natural gas consumption.
The future of energy is an abundance, as long as we make sure to utilities V2G and not let utilities dictate all the rules (and control more power and money). Everyone will be driving around with excess energy. Utilize that when plugging in at work and the grid will be much more resilient. It also allows to use more renewable energy. I don't see utilities controlling business power usage like you say in the future.
always impressed by your videos, they are very polished and have a nice flow of information. big fan of what you do and hope you continue to research and inform the rest of us
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He's on tele gram
Having an education in engineering, it seems clear to me that the flywheel is much more analogous to a capacitor than a battery.
Old school. Wight
Power companies need to generate more power than needed as a buffer to accommodate instantaneous spikes in usage. Flywheels' "instant output" capability lets them maintain a smaller buffer and thus save $. This long-term cost advantage is why they make a good investment.
The "instant spikes" people keep referencing are not in measured in milliseconds, they come over seconds to minutes, as people cycle air conditioning, solar, or wind, because of cloud cover or industrial shift-work. Renewables are not as 'unstable' as everyone seems to want to say.
I have this discouraging suspicion that the CEO's kid needs a new yacht because the last one is 2 years old, therefore the board won't vote for spending on improvements like this. However, I agree with you, it needs to happen.
@@MichaelRussell3000 True, only "instantaneous" compared to the time it takes to get additional steam pressure to a turbine. A coal plant operator told me that it takes 24 hours to go from cold start to full power. How many minutes to ramp a gas fired plant up from 50% to 100?
@MichaelRussell3000 So many people think off the potential downfalls always say this like "You gotta be careful" then go into speel people should think more like give it a try we don't need a one shoe fits all it doesn't always have too be the best option every option comes with pros n cons short term and long term and every system can be adapted and improved people should focuse on mixing systems more n trying new idea n not focusing on the one grid have back up local systems storage batts are not hard too make and nor are batteries there's littarally unlimited designs...there's alot off restrictions in energy world due too profit margins because something too good would make no money and or if simple n effective people could make themselves...cheers
@@jshaw4757 - Cheers? After reading that I need to throw up.
Hey Matt,
At one of my past jobs we deployed flywheel storage, vacuum containment and magnetic bearings, can't remember rpm but I seem to remember it being north of 10k rpm, maybe 20k? This was for a heavy load telecom facility. First we deployed 4 MW along side a new expansion (conversion of an office building to datecenter), then later migration of the existing facilities on site to another 4 MW.
We weren't using them as primary backup power, instead they were ONLY used for UPS failover during MW genset startup. We went with flywheel as the maintenance and footprint was drastically smaller than the lead-acid traditional batteries in that role, and they didn't want newer battery tech as the 2nd floor was still office, and fire was a concern.
The deployment architecture was we had containerized sleds for ease of transport, site prep, and future replaceability. Each sled was a matched set of a 1 MW genset, flywheel, and a small bank of lead acid for genset startup. Again, all the flywheels did was maintain that MW load during a grid failure until the genset spun up and sync'd. Otherwise they just sat there, spinning, waiting....
As far as I know, we were the first flywheel deployment at this particular nationwide telecom, and the architecture became a standard for other facilities. (The nature of our facility was to showcase next gen tech and perform tech and integration test in a simulated large scale live network. Lots of fun projects like this. (We also showcased an ambient air exchange cooling for data center pods, no cfc or even water involved, just massive air movement.)
Fun to see flywheel getting some attention!
Energy storage? Probably not. Energy management? Seems likely. Handling output differentials, redirecting energy across larger interconnected grids, seems reasonable to implement them for some advantages they have. Storage won't be one of those.
They are valid storage methods. Just cannot store energy for as long as batteries or dams can. In a way it's similar to electrolytic hydrogen since it dissipates out of tanks over time.
But you can do all of that either with traditional syncons or with grid-forming inverters attached to a battery farm. The latter is increasingly taking over from syncons in my country as coal plants close and the battery farms are built - they're cheaper, more efficient and lower maintenance than traditional syncons, and a LOT cheaper than these things that need failure-prone vacuum chambers and expensive extreme precision. High speed flywheels do have their round-trip efficiency going for them, but that is not enough to offset their big economic disadvantages.
@@kenoliver8913 batteries being cheap are at the mercy of geopolitical stability sadly having a diverse portfolio of technologies is always beneficial I think
Just the losses alone make it not worth it for energy storage. You have to continually pump power into it, but you always lose some percentage of the energy you pump in, along with a percentage of the energy you pump out, and that's just on the mechanical side of things. Turn to the electrical side of things, where you need to convert things, both when energy is applied and taken out, and you're looking at more like a base loss of at least 40% of all energy that goes through them. That's also before you start adding even more losses, like transmission over distance losses. Even directly from a power plant, 66% of ALL power is lost before it even makes it to a wall plug. Then you have conversion losses in electronics. People would be shocked if they realized just how inefficient the energy grid actually is, to the point that gasoline actually yields greater energy. That's why they made gas soo expensive, because when gas was $1 a gallon, it was literally cheaper to run your house on a gas generator than to use the grid. As electricity became more and more expensive, they had to jack up the price of gasoline, because they knew people would eventually realize that they could just buy a gas generator and power their home for cheaper, and they couldn't have that, because it would destroy the grid, so in order to keep the grid going (and people paying the greedily high prices), they had to make sure all alternatives were too expensive to compete. That's the true reality of our world. You're not paying more for gas because it's bad for the environment, you're paying more because the energy grid couldn't compete with gas generators.
This could change with improving technology, but yes they seem to be most useful in smoothing out the intraday power fluctuations. For which they are definitely very useful.
Thanks
This is a useful technology as a giant capacitor, but it is also a bit silly as a storage solution. What we're doing in Norway is building a smart-grid. This will allow us to sell energy on a kilowatt-second basis. So when there's a lot of energy available, that can be dumped directly into people's hot water for later consumption. Funnily, hot water is a solid state battery and the existing storage capacity is extremely enormous. As more Norwegian houses are heated with hot water, the capacity will also increase dramatically. All it really needs is a $5 smart-plug and a software service.
But the opposite would work equally well in hot countries, where you could dump coldness (kiss) into the water to store energy and then using water cooling when you want to get rid of indoor heat.
This is a one way system. Converting back to electricity would be very ineffective. With the price we have on electricity the cost for single homes make it unpractical most places. You need system like the have in Denmark that supply the whole local area.
You cannot generate electricity with hot water. What are you talking about?
@@Trueye-sl2mr You can not do it efficiently.
In this regard, the 'cold' of seawater (from about 100m depth) is terribly underutilized in hotter regions.
@@aryaman05 Yes, but salt water is a difficult substance to handle.
About 2002, I was working in the SAVVIS datacenter in Tukwila Washington. We had a ~1MW flywheel systems. It was from a company in Switzerland but I forget the name now off the top of my head. The system had about a 3 or 4 minute energy retention capacity which was basically plenty of time to start the backup generators which were maintained in hot standby mode (oil was hot, coolant was hot, etc) so that they could come online at operating speed with almost no delay. It was super cool and worked great.
@UndecidedMF27 what?
Matt loves his puns.
His flywheel puns are in heavy rotation today.
They're spinning me out !!!
Thanks Matt for all the coverage and the depth and detail.
I would say these would be very useful on a neighborhood scale. There are frequent small power outages in Texas and this seems like it would make more sense to install rather than each house getting their own generator.
Taxas's issues are far more fundamental than the neighborhood scale. This would be a sticking plaster. Texas needs to smooth its power supply by collecting up the neighboring states, surely.
Given a simple frost brought the Texas power grid to its knees, its problems go far, far deeper than just neighborhood installations.
This is worse energy storage than biodiesel (which can be as simple as animal fat). Just get (or build, they can be made from garbage) a stirling generator and use biodiesel, these things can run off chickenshit fire if you run out of alternatives.
@@custos3249 simple frost? first time it stayed below freezing for 2 weeks straight in hundreds of years, AND it took a ton of bad maintenance and negligent cheapness to actually make it a problem. the grid wasnt the issue with that just like the grid wasnt the issue with fukishima.
@@bradhaines3142 *laughs in northerner and civil engineering
Ok, champ.
Love your channel. You’re always thinking ahead and giving us updates on the latest and greatest thank you.
Personal systems. Wind generation has big overspin issues here, making the need for brakes and major power burn off. Combine fess storage as a direct and or electrical drive, using some form of disengagement for no wind times. Seems that would work in place of the brake as well as storing energy. May not be feasible but worth a thought or two.
Bit like a resistive dump-load common with wind turbines, I guess - just a bit more useful than producing heat to bleed off excess generation and keeping the blade spin in spec.
@@mb-3faze Squeeze any penny we can, I think in off grid terms. Its something to ponder on, anyways.
Not sure if it's just me but the PowerPoint style title pages and noises take away from the video. The rest is flawless and flows really well. Keep up the great work Matt
Thanks Matt!
Seriously puntastic video, Matt! :)
Proud to work for Torus!😊
Little Barford Power Station in the UK is a CCGT (Closed Circuit Gas Turbine power station). Powered by gas. In 2016 or some near year Little Barford had a lightening Strike on a Pylon opposite our house in Roxton, and it failed taking the whole grid down. It took many hours of no electricity before the grid was stable again. The grid was put back on very carefully in chunks across the UK. Electric Trains got stuck as the frequency dropped outside their ranges.
2019 I guess. Caused some finger pointing as to why the grid didn't stabilize for over an hour.
It's silly how narrow the operable frequency range of the grid is right now. My regenerative VFD can output and regen power from 10Hz to 10MHz!
@@leggysoft
The MIT Professor Don Sadoway who developed the grid level dirt cheap long life stable battery tech .... does a great talk on the problems of grid Frequency control and stabilisation in terms of historic grid management using just generators.
CCGT stands for Closed Cycle Gas Turbine. Basically you use the hot gas coming out of the turbine's exhaust to make steam and drive a steam turbine - bulky, expensive to build and (like all steam turbines) hard to ramp up and down but much more fuel efficient than an OCGT (Open Cycle GT).
Nit Pick Mode on!. at 5:34, did you mean The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (entropy in a closed system always increases)? This seems more appropriate for the context than Newton's First Law.
Came here for this. Newton's First Law is the law of inertia, which says that moving things tend to keep moving. He's trying to say that the wheel will slow down, the exact opposite of what N1L says. I agree that the 2nd Law of Thermo is a more appropriate justification for inefficiency.
Sounds like a great idea!
One idea that occurs to me: tiered use. Assuming you can extract energy from each unit independently (which I'm sure you can set up in a facility if you want to) you could presumably use your array of FESS's to maintain a subset of them for longer. Not ideal for efficiency - you'd only want to do this if you wanted to rig up longer term storage while not using battery tech (which might be useful in some places, given the cost of battery chemicals vs the cost of a big hunk of metal) but if you needed to, you could draw down the energy from FESS A to keep B through E spinning until it runs out, then draw on B to keep C-E done, then tap C for D-E, and then D for E. There's definitely a point at which the efficiency problem kills this chain, but it could extend a flywheel's operation cycle up to 24 hours to work with a solar plant for sure.
Like I said, efficiency of transfer of energy is the killer here, this isn't a trick for long term extension of flywheels to make them a super-ideal thing..just a trick that would allow a FESS system to hold onto power longer than it might otherwise.
(And I'm sure there's probably systems that have looked into doing this and are doing it if it's actually feasible.)
Before reliable battery systems were available fly wheel ‘no break generators’ were used to maintain electrical power to critical systems in the event of a power cut. I worked at and airport where the radar equipment was powered by a generator powered by an electric motor, between them was a large spinning concrete disc. When the power went off the generator continued to provide power for the few seconds it took for the diesel generator to start.
This system was cheaper than having the radar powered from a diesel generator continuously.
I assume the same sort of systems would use a continuously charging battery now, connected to an inverter.
The flywheel system worked well back then (late ‘70s) as lead acid batteries need a lot of maintenance, plus we needed a.c. for the radar systems. I don’t think inverters, other than dc motors driving an alternator existed.
3:45 why carbon fiber? Don't heavier flywheels store more energy?
Speed carries more energy than mass. The formula is something with Speed^2 . The limiting factor is the tensile strength, and carbon fiber is stronger than steel. Some flywheels have exploded when a crack came in the spoke
Carbon fiber dries out overtime and becomes brittle. It's designed obsolescence. It's how green energy is manufactured, sell the governments the line that it's advanced technology and then deliver them the tech while keeping them on the hook for repair and maintenance to make the profit. Tell the public it's good for the environment when in reality it's worse. The laws of physics state that the world is in a state of entropy, meaning more and more work is required to complete the same objective. More money is needed for projects. More labor is needed for projects. Project results will continue to diminish. That is why the projects are always bigger with more funding and more labor. The world is dying, and only Jesus can save it.
Excellent stuff, Matt! I'm very thankful for your work👍
A lot of the arguments around which tech to use in renewable power feels like it could be solved with the "Oh neat, two cakes" argument. Surely implementing as many of these as possible is the answer. We've been arguing about which one to use so much that we're closing in on a very nasty deadline without having a set plan. At least if we scatter shot as many as possible, gravity batteries, flywheels, modular nuclear reactors, hydro batteries etc we can extend the deadline. We dont need the number one ideal confirmed solution right away, we just need something and we need it fast
Diversification has always been the answer. Only idiots chase after economic hyper optimization.
there isnt any deadline, thats in your head and I bet you are highly neurotic
@@Jueyes-vg2gb wrong
@@cornishcat11 right
@@Jueyes-vg2gb What do you mean when you say there isn't a deadline? Given that you don't explain it, I suspect it might be just a joy of anonymously trolling with faith-based, ideological thinking instead of logic. And I can understand why one wouldn't be public about denying the painfully obvious outside of the KoolAid drinking tribe.
I think the best analogous thing to this is like a capacitor or inductor coil. It heavily resists fluctuations in power. Both are used in small electronics to smooth out voltage supplies and prevent spikes from damaging components. They're not a battery, but they do have a significant roll to play in the grid system by smoothing out high demand that a battery can't do.
My ding is also very lung 🗿
So cut it
😂😂
Can I have it?
Another scholar and intellectual I see
Lacist....!
Quebec had a nuclear reactor located about halfway between the two major load centres (Quebec City and Montreal).
A benefit was that the inertia of the generator (which ran pretty much 100% output) was line stability as consumption changed on the line. The massive generator's inertia helped regulate voltage and phase change while also (of course) putting power on the system. Due to refurbishment costs the utility decided to shut it down. Recently the question of refurbing it came up again, but that seems to have died out.
15 minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but it's valuable in the late afternoon when load goes up quickly over the course of about 2 hours. So dump the power a couple wheels at a time as fits the system.
I think you conflated two ideas:
1. Flywheels for energy storage, in which case the rotational speed will vary as it charges and discharges and all that it offers is a source of power, or
2. Flywheels for frequency stabilisation, in which case the rotational speed is tied to grid frequency and essentially constant.
You cannot do both at the same time. It is probably expensive to build a system that can operate in either mode as the latter needs a synchronous motor and the former needs a more conventional motor.
Heard of Variable frequency drives? They use semiconductors to perform the switching.
Frequency stability is not a problem. Fluctuation in the frequency are a way to help voltage / power stability on the very short time. Just spinning turbines (e.g. in steam based power plants) act as some fly wheel stabilitzation, though usually with not much active control and limited effect. An efficient flywheel storage would need a variable speed and some variable motor / generator. This can be via an intermediate DC step and electronics, or with syncrohnous generator with low frequency AC excitation - the AC excitation can adjust the frequency with less power from an electronic inverter. This technique is also frequently used with wind turbines to use them with variable speed and saving on the power of the electronic inverter.
There were some data centers that used flywheels instead of battery to carry critical load until the diesel generators fired up. I think the maintenance cost became very difficult. Replacing the flywheel itself is super expensive and the same battery capacity became cheap. The spinning of that big of a mass is going to generate friction no matter what and preventing that in a mission critical environment is 😬
both dinglun and moneypoint had a written "MW" on screen but for the latter, you said MWh which is a completely different thing. when talking about energy storage, plain power figure only tells you about maximum momentary power and nothing about amount of energy stored (i think both have chemical batteries too). so which is it?
Ultimately you're wanting 50Hz / 60Hz (depending on the country you live in), I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't just rectify whatever high frequency AC is coming out of the flywheel to DC and then use an inverter to convert it back to 3 phase AC for sync and frequency. Frequency and phase matching is incredibly important to prevent failures at generation sites or loads.
A generation site can get disconnected if phase and frequency aren't closely matched to the load in order to prevent damage, but if a generation site (or sites) are disconnected, the remaining connected sites are now under more load, and that causes them to get further out of sync, exacerbating the problem, which leads to wide spread failures unless the load can be shed (ie forced blackouts), or more generation can step in at phase and frequency, and return everything to normal. If every generation site is knocked out, that leads to a 'black start', which is pretty complicated to recover from as something needs to provide the clock (or frequency) that sites are synchronised to, and it also requires bringing the areas disconnected on in stages to prevent everything from rapidly falling out of step again.
Or, we could just install (more?) nuclear and avoid the complication of storage atop synchronisation, at least until the fusion nut is cracked. In my mind, flywheels are a good solution for sites to have something to provide power while diesel generators come online in case of a blackout, and this is exactly how several datacentres I worked at did things (and that was old tech 20 years ago), but trying to make this small scale solution fit for large scale seems like elimating the problem with more reliable generation to start with is smarter. The turbine at a nuclear/coal/gas plant will have an integrated flywheel rotating at the same speed as the turbine/generator to smooth out sudden changes in load, and permit a bit of time to change how much heat the fuel produces and is centuries old tech.
An unpopular opinion, I know, but I see these products as being useful only in specific scenarios, at large scale it seems like a waste of resources.
This is pretty much exactly what both traditional syncons (look 'em up) and the smart inverters on many battery farms do.
Flywheels inability to hold energy for any significant length of time is their biggest barrier as oftentimes the time between excess renewables and insufficient is hours and flywheels short dispatch time make them a hard to reccomend candidate for energy storage. Especially since Li-ion batteries can do the same thing to a greater degree
And Lithium chemistry batteries are constantly improving in charge speed. An individual battery might never be able to provide the near instantaneous response of a flywheel in terms of an energy dump or source - but multiple batteries might.
If there is anything more dangerous than a facilty full of giant 50k rpm flywheels, it's a facility with an array of lithium batteries of equal output. One mishap anywhere would turn the place into an environmental nightmare coupled with a spectacular weeklong fireball. Lithium batteries would do a better job but at a much higher risk and expense.
@@Ichibuns Yes, one worse would be an above ground flywheel in a lithium battery storage place where the flywheel spins out and destroys the lithium batteries in a huge fireball of a spinning wheel out of control. For that reason alone the best would be an in ground flywheel to level loads of the battery bank. In a failure the ground could absorb the abuse and contain the flywheel.
@@Ichibuns LFP batteries which are the predominantly used batteries in utility scale battery storage are less prone to thermal runaway than other battery chemistries and the way that battery farms are built make it so that it is less likely for the whole farm to catch fire if one container has an issue
4:00 that ad read made it sound like the big problem with FESS is that it causes a deluge of emails
When you see how the shift to green is and has to be multiple systems patching each other's short comings, it's kind of amazing we got this far with dirtier energies as the primary option.
Yup. In the long run, it will have less waste and pollution generated compared to the more popular mode of power/energy generation.
Flywheel for emergency power to bridge the gap between power supply failure during backup generating equipment startup. I've seen one on a large industrial facility. Always spinning just incase. Coupled to a few thousand HP diesel generator, critical system power. Awesome engineering.
China really be out there trying every form of energy production and storage 😅 at scale.
Just like America did in the past. Inventing and innovating had a home in America.
@@milohobo9186 same in Europe
It seems to me like China is really taking the lead in sustainability.
Because they understand the value of energy independence while the west keeps throwing subsidies at oil companies
@@jb007gd Yes they are. They do not have the public resistance to change in a system like theirs. The science says these are the facts and the government moves to implement no matter what the public thinks.
I like that this gets everyone pointing out the pros and cons of various systems. That is actually what the channel "Undecided" is all about 🎉😂
Is the Dinglun station 30MW or 30MWh? You used MW units, not MWh, and then said that the Torus + Gardner Group system would provide 26MWh and that this approaches the capacity of the Dinglun system.
@@amdreallyfast Not providing the amount of time it can supply the 30 MW is a serious miss. Matt may have been quoting the Energy Storage News article which also did not mention the time component. A single AA battery can provide 30 MW, but probably only for an insignificant attosecond.
It got a bit confusing. I guess it can be both 30MW and 30MWh if the site provided 30MW of power but only for 1 hour.
@@amdreallyfast MW is a measure of energy per second, while (counterintuitively) MWh is a measure for the amount of energy, so the capability of a plant is measured in MW, while the amount or stored energy is measured in MWh.
The unit breakdown is:
M: prefix for a Million, 10^6
W: watt = J/s, Joules per second, which is energy over time
h: hour, which is time
Watt-hour means energy over time, times time: ((J/s) * h). The time cancels out, while the energy, measured in Joules, is left as the only unit.**
**multiplied by a 3600 coefficient as there are 3600 seconds in an hour
I no longer remember the details and haven't watched the video completely yet, but these systems usually work for maybe 10-30 minutes at full power.
@@oraziovescovi1922 Yeah, but that doesn't then explain how much power the plant can actually hold. Only how much it can output. If it has 30 mw/s of energy storage, that's pitiful in comparison to 30 mw/h's. Not to mention that even 30 mw/h's seem a bit low.
Great article, I had never heard of Flywheel Storage before, as you say it's perfect for steadying out power stations. We need some here in Australia as talk is that rooftop is going to be throttled back or blocked, crazy....
Hmm, 60 years ago. Pumped water storage.
People get upset when you flood their communities to create power storage reservoirs.
@stargazer7644 PUMPED..means water was pumpED UP.
@@charlesgates9814 You don't find many rivers or reservoirs on top of mountains. Dams are built where the water is. Which is on the rivers at the BOTTOM of the hills. That is also coincidentally where people build communities - on the rivers where there's a water supply. You pump the water UP to the higher water level behind the DAM. You let the water out to fall DOWN through the dam's turbines to get the power back. That's how reservoirs work for energy storage.
Thanks for sharing Matt.
Thanks for watching, Ron.
I had no idea these were a thing. I love learning new things.
The concept of mechanical energy storage is interesting, and flywheels are an interesting concept. For many applications though, I think gravity-based mechanical energy storage is perhaps more feasible for long-term storage.
Thank you and good morning!
Nice video thank you. I remember reading about Porsche testing a flywheel system in a 911 race car many years ago. You can reinvent the wheel after all.
You got my upvote with "we took a spin at this topic" and "rolling out installations" :D
Loving the Dad jokes, "Don't let that spin you round", "Flywheels are really picking up speed".
I’ve seen those systems that pump water uphill to store energy but never seen this type battery before. Pretty cool.
Loved this Hank. Totally convinced.
Yes! This is what I’ve been saying ever since battery storage became a thing. Flywheels are way better now. Frictionless bearings is a game changer
The first "large-scale" commercial flywheel energy storage system in China has been deployed in the rail transit system. During deceleration, the subway can recover and store braking energy through the flywheel, and during acceleration, it can release this energy. This approach helps reduce the impact on the power grid. Additionally, this flywheel energy storage system is well-suited to the frequent start-and-stop nature of subway operations, fully leveraging its advantages of rapid response, high charge-discharge efficiency, and short charging time, while avoiding the limitation of the flywheel system's inability to store energy for long durations. If I recall correctly, the power rating of this flywheel energy storage system is approximately 10MW.
They absolutely have a support role in the changing landscape of energy
Fascinating engineering solution. I wonder what else can be accomplished. Thanks for another great video.
I've installed Vycon flywheels on UPS systems. They require more upkeep than batteries, but they last longer. Main benefit was to get around local fire regulations limiting size of battery installations.
Interesting topic Excellent presentation as always Matt. Thank you
The company I work for has some bleeding edge IP in this field. We have the tech for a 150kRPM flywheel with nearly zero eddy current losses. It's a fantastic system. It does use a vacuum sealed chamber and a combination ruby and magnetic bearing.
My big question is how long the switching circuitry will last. Probably a pretty wild inverter circuit running these things. Really impressive coulombic efficiency though
I think one can reasonably expect the inverter durability to be comparable to an EV, assuming adequate cooling, because they use EV powertrains. Luckily, the inverter is one of the more easily replaceable components of a FESS.
@tanner3801 very true
Flywheels are used in virtually every piston operated internal combustion engine to smooth out the jerkyness of the combustion cycle. Different flywheels are used in different applications. A sports car or race car may have a lighter flywheel to improve responsiveness and allow for higher revs while trucks will usually have a heavier one for retaining torque. The flywheel is geared allowing the starter to drive it, thus it serves a dual purpose. All that said, finding them in other applications is fascinating.
I was just thinking hybrid storage makes a lot of sense using flywheel, battery and solar panels for small grid applications. And then you mentioned it as being done now. Things just keep getting better and better as we learn more.
Wonder when someone will come up with a micro nuclear plant attached to a flywheel for home power without grid? Heinlein's idea of the "shipstone company" without mentioning nuclear power or flywheels. He saw that coming in the 1930s and 1840s. Essentially a sealed unit that lasted about twenty years or more. Hope someone somewhere is working on it. Imagine how that could solve the issue of large truck power for moving goods and single home use for remote landscape use.
This video has soo much energy.
china is making strides in energy storage while americans are still debating whether climate change is a hoax
This is a great video. Thank you! Pros/Cons as always.
interesting a tech I forgot about. Would like a follow up one day on the residential side of this tech. Ty Matt enjoyed watching
Cool to see my office in the montage around 11:43-11:45.
0:42 "Aber Kinetics has been
ROLLING out installations"
I saw what you did here. 😄
9:40 according to "the internet" Together, the flywheel and the synchronous condenser have an inertia of 4,000 megawatt-seconds. The 160 MWh figure may be the total energy in the spinning, but only a small fraction of that can be used in this configuration (frequency stabilisation).
instead of flywheels, use gravity battery for this use case. the gravity battery does not lose energy over time. it has 100% capacity retention.
Wind turbines already are flywheels and per this vid a lot bigger than the storage flywheels, and they do already work with momentum.
So, they could simply be conceptualized to also work as storage flywheels. When there is no wind, which is when you would need storage, and, even with wind, you could feed solar energy to make them rotate at higher rate and store additional energy without (presumably) affecting their efficiency much. When there is no wind, the blades already are rotatable so just move them to vertical position so the momentum can be maintained without creating wind drag
But I guess the problem is the battery flywheels spin at much higher speeds, so you'd have to add a planetary gear or transmission introducing more mechanical parts, to also increase the turbine speed, and both high speeds and gears would reduce longevity.
If you think big hundred foot long blades spinning have no wind drag, then I have a bridge to sell you.
You do nice work Matt
Yes we need all sources Of greeen tech and new tech as well. Dude you always deliver ty
My 70’s Chevy with a 427 big block has a flywheel. Smooths out the power for better clutch engagement.
It smooths out the power so the engine will keep turning between cylinder firings.
I've always been a fan of using flywheels for energy generation ever since I learned about buses being powered by them 50 years ago.
Have you seen those gravity/buoyancy based energy storage solutions? Those seem better to me - you can keep stacking concrete blocks or lowering balloons underwater to store the energy, and then when you want to generate, you hook a generator to a line and let the balloon or block go and the line unravels and spins the generator. Seems safer than a spinning death machine, and gravity and buoyancy don't lose energy over time.
Flywheel is used in air craft carrier EMAL (Electromagnetic Lunch) system for aircraft assisted launch. It fits the time scale.
A flywheel going several Kilometers through a forest felling trees, is what happened in Bavaria/ Germany. Some flywheel they used there to power the magnetic field of a Tokamak just broke(free)...
There used to be a TV show called "spin city." I never watched it. But I have thought about putting an entire city onto a turntable for energy storage. Quite the deal, huh? Think of the ramifications... The centrifugal force, sunrise and sunset, driving to and from the city, having a ball game in a city park! Bowling at a city bowling alley! What would trees look like? Not sure about the depth or rotational speed of this city.
In the seventies I was shown an huge and at that time seemingly ancient flywheel that was used as a power filter. Power in went to the motor. On the other side a generator was constantly running. The result was stable power without voltage spikes.
It's called a syncon (synchronous converter) and an important part of any large grid. Though usually replaced by solid-state electronics these days. Look it up.
I love your unrelenting commitment to the pun.
Flywheels are great where they are great, but that's not in most use cases.
Audi used flywheels instead of batteries on LeMans winning cars, I've used them as power backup for a server farm, manufacturing plants use them to stabilize heavy machines from fluctuations.
They are great for starting up back-up diesel generators while maintaining the power without interruption.
The rotation of wind mills are giving the grid more than enough inertia. That’s why you need flywheels only at big pv or battery installations.
I saw a flywheel used in a data center in the early 2000s to smooth out grid fluctuations and act as the first stage of the backup power supply.
I remember back in the mid 2000's when the company I worked for were looking at changing the UPS for the server room, one of the options that was mentioned was a flywheel based UPS.
Sadly, we went with traditional lead acid batteries. Would've loved to try something different tho.
Flywheel constructed from a large array of L/A batteries ??? 😉
This is perfect for grid stabilization for the small scale regulation that happens several times a minute.
These can be charged and recharged almost an endless amount of times.
Always very informative and educational, I was more used to Diesel Rotary UPS systems , DRUPS in short
Imagine Earth is inundated with flywheel stations, then suddenly they all stopped/slowed down at the same time. "Breaking News: Earth shifted another 3" due to humans. "
One place flywheels could be an obvious fit: in conversion from DC solar power to grid-tied, frequency-matched AC. If the flywheel already needs to do frequency matching, you can use solar to spin up the flywheel with essentially no conversion (using a DC motor) and then use the flywheel itself to convert to AC. (You'd need enough flywheels and for their DC inputs to be out-of-phase so that the PWM-based motor speed control is sending those pulses to different motors at different times to maximize energy consumption, though a capacitor bank can smooth some of that over...)
A lot of these techs benefit from being deployed together for efficiency gains like this.
This can't work. The flywheel does not spin at a constant speed - it is constantly variable with the energy stored. Solid state inverters are far more efficient than any kind of motor/alternator configuration for AC generation.