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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
the best use for flywheels I have found is in a mod for the video game Timberborn, a colony sim of beavers in a post-apocalyptic future when hoomans have gone extinct and only Beaverkind remains and this mod offers flywheels to store energy as an alternative to their gravity batteries.
Decades ago (1990s?) I ready an amazing article in Discover about flywheels as battery storage. As I recall they got the flywheel down to a super-cheap device. But the real breakthrough was a single motor that acted both as a means of spinning it up and also taking power from the spin. They had a working home prototype (to be buried in the yard and forgotten about - no contamination) and one in a car! - the car flywheel acted as stabilization and if there was a high-speed hard impact accident the flywheel instantly turned into soft spaghetti helping to absorb the energy of the impact. The endeavour, US Flywheels, was partially funded by Kevin Costner and run by his brother. But Waterworld tanking at the box office put an end to that dream as the funding for the company was dependant on the film's profits. I was always so sad about this tech never materializing. . It seems like such a cool, clean, safe and basic tech. I'd love to see it come back to life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can see fly wheels becoming standard components for solar and wind. It'll just be another part that is taken for granted because it is so useful and obvious after the fact.
This is a great idea, until corporations decide that corporate bonuses are more important than ensuring that the machinery is kept in good working order, at that point the bad stuff hits the fan, the amount of energy stored in a flywheel moving at the speed that they do will cause absolute ruination and death when the bearings fail because the high ups wanted a little more for themselves.
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.
Good summary, flywheels offer specific advantages but are hardly a cure all. Nice option to have but not required. Have to be careful lumping synchronous condensers in with flywheels. The may offer real energy to the system but only momentary and are more of a stabilizer than a backup. For years people used depressed hydro units as synchronized reserve when all they ever were was voltage support. Without water passing thru the wheel and available governor action that’s all they are. To get true spinning reserve you have to have access to the prime mover. Flywheels do offer some room for system regulation and stabilization. Take any large hydro unit and bid it into the market for regulation. Before you know it will either be maximized or minimized. Seldom will it’s ability to generate be respected. Wishing you and your family the best.
the future of renewable energy needs to be the Team Work of as many sources as possible, with Flywheel batteries serving a very good role at stabilizing the energy outputs. Not as a replacement to battery storage
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
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.
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.
If scaled down to a hot water heater sized home backup... This makes me think of "The Windup Girl" (sci-fi novel) where they had perfected the wound spring as energy storage devices, using elephants to manually wind them!
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
@@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.
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.
As a French speaker, the "Flywheel Energy Storage System (FESS)" made me laugh a bit more than I'd like to admit xD Because literally, the acronym means "ass" in French: FESS -> FESSe -> Ass.
I'd personally like to see solar and wind generation at homes directly, with flywheels for stability, all wired together in parallel to the rest of their neighborhood with grid power either being a backup or used to distribute the power to the surrounding area.
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 😬
Could be a good option for vehicle battery charging in the high charge rate range.. Spin it up on 110-220volt and discharge quickly into a high charge rate vehicle, thus preventing the grid spikes at 5-7pm and allowing quick charge without grid spikes.
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.
I thought of an idea of gigantic flywheel rings - about 100 feet or so in diameter, say the thickness of a truck tanker all the way round, buried in a tube underground somehow magnetically levitated, how fast could they 'spin'? - and how they would be charged/discharged I have no idea!
Knowing the self-discharge rate of smaller systems such as the Key Energy installation in Perth would be helpful. For rural or off-grid installations, when coupled with solar, their long non-degrading lifespan and low fire risk could make them much more appealing than lithium-ion batteries. Did you find any information on this? Can they last hours, days or weeks? Being able to supply full, uninterrupted power until they could be recharged the next time the sun is out would be the key metric.
Their 'self-discharge rate' if you want to call it that is not great. It's far worse than batteries. They are more like a mechanical capacitor - great for short duration grid control applications. Nevertheless, a big enough system could supply a home for several hours. It's just that the conversion rate from solar to stored energy to then useful energy that ends up in the house is much better with batteries. Of course, if you have oodles of solar like in lucky Oz, then any energy storage, regardless of efficiency, will get you through the night.
Excellent what is the effect on the uderground surface where you put it is not clear.What if we add battery grid after production like sand storage and other store it will be sustainable and sufficient
As I see it, there are multiple reasons to store excess renewable energy. Each having their own best way of doing this depending on when and how long you plan to use this stored energy. The solution for storing energy you plan on using when the sun goes down is probably totally different than the energy you store to use tomorrow when weather forecasts are not ideal. Or the energy you use in the winter.
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.
Another benefit of flywheels is they aren't very flammable, so putting them in the basement of a building isn't going to be as much of a risk to the structure. Batteries aren't as much of a fire hazard as some people think, I'd rather have a battery over a generator and fuel, but both of those burn hot and long if they cook off. I can see a future where foundations for most buildings are designed with flywheels in mind, doing all the digging at once to save on costs, while chemical batteries are kept separate either in an open lot or dedicated building, and combustion generators are abandoned entirely.
Fire isn't the only risk to a building. Flywheels store an immense amount of potential energy. Whether they're flammable or not, if you release that energy in an uncontrolled fashion (via mechanical or material failure) you're going to destroy a bunch of the building.
@@stargazer7644 They aren't completely risk free, but designing and building a structure to withstand the impact of flywheels coming apart isn't going to be excessively expensive, and once they break, it is over. Fire on the other hand can ignite the rest of the building, and fill it with smoke and toxic fumes. There is no such thing as completely safe energy storage, the laws of thermodynamics prohibit it, but different forms of energy storage have different risks, and I'd rather have a flywheel in the basement than a battery, let alone a diesel generator.
@@TheReykjavik Before you go designing your containment structure in the basement, keep in mind the energy released by a 30MW flywheel coming apart is equivalent to 30 sticks of dynamite.
@@stargazer7644 Most buildings are not going to house the world's largest flywheel storage system, so the actual number is a lot lower than 30 sticks of dynamite.
@@TheReykjavik oh good grief. You really are incredibly good at completely missing the point. Ok, scale it to whatever you like. You've now got one stick of dynamite in the basement now. Does that make you feel better? Is your box in the basement going to contain that? If you make it much smaller, it won't be terribly useful as a power source. 30MW is a pretty small power source when generation is measured in gigawatts. There's a reason these are getting bigger.
I wonder why they don't build huge 100 m high towers of flywheels that are supported by hydraulic bearings underground. These towers could be rotating at reduced rpms to avoid complicated shield structures
You could but the key feature of flywheels is the energy stored is proportional to the angular velocity *squared*. So a lighter-weight, fast spinning flywheel is 'better' than a heavy, slow moving flywheel.
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.
@thomasgade226 Lol One is a measure of power output, the other is a measure of a store of power. They can be two completely different amounts for the same system. It makes zero sense to conflate one with the other, unless one's intention is to spread confusion or misinformation.
I think of flywheel batteries more like capacitors. Accumulators see a lot of *obvious* use but capacitors are used as lower level components, quick charge and discharge but low storage.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Matt loves his puns.
His flywheel puns are in heavy rotation today.
They're spinning me out !!!
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.
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.
My ding is also very lung 🗿
So cut it
😂😂
Can I have it?
Another scholar and intellectual I see
Lacist....!
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
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.
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.
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.
Proud to work for Torus!😊
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.
Thanks Matt!
Excellent stuff, Matt! I'm very thankful for your work👍
Thanks Matt for all the coverage and the depth and detail.
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.
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.
Loving the Dad jokes, "Don't let that spin you round", "Flywheels are really picking up speed".
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
4:00 that ad read made it sound like the big problem with FESS is that it causes a deluge of emails
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
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.
Loved this Hank. Totally convinced.
the best use for flywheels I have found is in a mod for the video game Timberborn, a colony sim of beavers in a post-apocalyptic future when hoomans have gone extinct and only Beaverkind remains and this mod offers flywheels to store energy as an alternative to their gravity batteries.
I’ve seen those systems that pump water uphill to store energy but never seen this type battery before. Pretty cool.
Interesting topic Excellent presentation as always Matt. Thank you
Decades ago (1990s?) I ready an amazing article in Discover about flywheels as battery storage. As I recall they got the flywheel down to a super-cheap device. But the real breakthrough was a single motor that acted both as a means of spinning it up and also taking power from the spin. They had a working home prototype (to be buried in the yard and forgotten about - no contamination) and one in a car! - the car flywheel acted as stabilization and if there was a high-speed hard impact accident the flywheel instantly turned into soft spaghetti helping to absorb the energy of the impact. The endeavour, US Flywheels, was partially funded by Kevin Costner and run by his brother. But Waterworld tanking at the box office put an end to that dream as the funding for the company was dependant on the film's profits. I was always so sad about this tech never materializing. . It seems like such a cool, clean, safe and basic tech. I'd love to see it come back to life.
Thank you and good morning!
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.
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
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.
Fascinating engineering solution. I wonder what else can be accomplished. Thanks for another great video.
They are like capacitors for the grid
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.
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.
I can see fly wheels becoming standard components for solar and wind. It'll just be another part that is taken for granted because it is so useful and obvious after the fact.
interesting a tech I forgot about. Would like a follow up one day on the residential side of this tech. Ty Matt enjoyed watching
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.
Thanks for sharing Matt.
Thanks for watching, Ron.
flywheels are already a part of many power sources, since many generators integrate flywheels to make their output more consistent
This is a great idea, until corporations decide that corporate bonuses are more important than ensuring that the machinery is kept in good working order, at that point the bad stuff hits the fan, the amount of energy stored in a flywheel moving at the speed that they do will cause absolute ruination and death when the bearings fail because the high ups wanted a little more for themselves.
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.
Good summary, flywheels offer specific advantages but are hardly a cure all. Nice option to have but not required. Have to be careful lumping synchronous condensers in with flywheels. The may offer real energy to the system but only momentary and are more of a stabilizer than a backup. For years people used depressed hydro units as synchronized reserve when all they ever were was voltage support. Without water passing thru the wheel and available governor action that’s all they are. To get true spinning reserve you have to have access to the prime mover. Flywheels do offer some room for system regulation and stabilization. Take any large hydro unit and bid it into the market for regulation. Before you know it will either be maximized or minimized. Seldom will it’s ability to generate be respected. Wishing you and your family the best.
How about installing Flywheels in abandoned mines to lower the excavation costs?
Fly wheel energy storage does not need rare earths? What about the neodymium magnets used in the motor/generator?
the future of renewable energy needs to be the Team Work of as many sources as possible, with Flywheel batteries serving a very good role at stabilizing the energy outputs. Not as a replacement to battery storage
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
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.
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.
If scaled down to a hot water heater sized home backup... This makes me think of "The Windup Girl" (sci-fi novel) where they had perfected the wound spring as energy storage devices, using elephants to manually wind them!
Yes we need all sources Of greeen tech and new tech as well. Dude you always deliver ty
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
"Blowing up a spinning flywheel above ground" Im searching that next. Then Train Wrecking movies from the early 1900's.
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.
instead of flywheels, use gravity battery for this use case. the gravity battery does not lose energy over time. it has 100% capacity retention.
0:42 "Aber Kinetics has been
ROLLING out installations"
I saw what you did here. 😄
Interesting as I was thinking about flywheel as storage back in the 70's.
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.
As a French speaker, the "Flywheel Energy Storage System (FESS)" made me laugh a bit more than I'd like to admit xD
Because literally, the acronym means "ass" in French: FESS -> FESSe -> Ass.
I'd personally like to see solar and wind generation at homes directly, with flywheels for stability, all wired together in parallel to the rest of their neighborhood with grid power either being a backup or used to distribute the power to the surrounding area.
Just a side note, siemens and siemens energy are 2 different companies, it started as one, but a few years ago, they separated.
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 😬
Could be a good option for vehicle battery charging in the high charge rate range.. Spin it up on 110-220volt and discharge quickly into a high charge rate vehicle, thus preventing the grid spikes at 5-7pm and allowing quick charge without grid spikes.
feels like a wind farm could also function as a flywheel farm as well
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.
I thought of an idea of gigantic flywheel rings - about 100 feet or so in diameter, say the thickness of a truck tanker all the way round, buried in a tube underground somehow magnetically levitated, how fast could they 'spin'? - and how they would be charged/discharged I have no idea!
"Don't let that spin you around though" haha Matt
The main undecided question, why trust incogni
Knowing the self-discharge rate of smaller systems such as the Key Energy installation in Perth would be helpful. For rural or off-grid installations, when coupled with solar, their long non-degrading lifespan and low fire risk could make them much more appealing than lithium-ion batteries. Did you find any information on this? Can they last hours, days or weeks? Being able to supply full, uninterrupted power until they could be recharged the next time the sun is out would be the key metric.
Their 'self-discharge rate' if you want to call it that is not great. It's far worse than batteries. They are more like a mechanical capacitor - great for short duration grid control applications. Nevertheless, a big enough system could supply a home for several hours. It's just that the conversion rate from solar to stored energy to then useful energy that ends up in the house is much better with batteries. Of course, if you have oodles of solar like in lucky Oz, then any energy storage, regardless of efficiency, will get you through the night.
Flywheels are really coming around again!
Seems like flywheels and wind power would work well together to buffer out the variability of wind.
Excellent what is the effect on the uderground surface where you put it is not clear.What if we add battery grid after production like sand storage and other store it will be sustainable and sufficient
What effect on the underground surface?
Matt is on a roll!
As I see it, there are multiple reasons to store excess renewable energy. Each having their own best way of doing this depending on when and how long you plan to use this stored energy. The solution for storing energy you plan on using when the sun goes down is probably totally different than the energy you store to use tomorrow when weather forecasts are not ideal. Or the energy you use in the winter.
Yeah can you go in the well right next to the hundred ton barbell spinning at 50k rpm to inspect it and make sure everything is ok?
I live near the Stephentown plant. It made a lot of news when it was first built.
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 ??? 😉
Another benefit of flywheels is they aren't very flammable, so putting them in the basement of a building isn't going to be as much of a risk to the structure. Batteries aren't as much of a fire hazard as some people think, I'd rather have a battery over a generator and fuel, but both of those burn hot and long if they cook off. I can see a future where foundations for most buildings are designed with flywheels in mind, doing all the digging at once to save on costs, while chemical batteries are kept separate either in an open lot or dedicated building, and combustion generators are abandoned entirely.
Fire isn't the only risk to a building. Flywheels store an immense amount of potential energy. Whether they're flammable or not, if you release that energy in an uncontrolled fashion (via mechanical or material failure) you're going to destroy a bunch of the building.
@@stargazer7644 They aren't completely risk free, but designing and building a structure to withstand the impact of flywheels coming apart isn't going to be excessively expensive, and once they break, it is over. Fire on the other hand can ignite the rest of the building, and fill it with smoke and toxic fumes.
There is no such thing as completely safe energy storage, the laws of thermodynamics prohibit it, but different forms of energy storage have different risks, and I'd rather have a flywheel in the basement than a battery, let alone a diesel generator.
@@TheReykjavik Before you go designing your containment structure in the basement, keep in mind the energy released by a 30MW flywheel coming apart is equivalent to 30 sticks of dynamite.
@@stargazer7644 Most buildings are not going to house the world's largest flywheel storage system, so the actual number is a lot lower than 30 sticks of dynamite.
@@TheReykjavik oh good grief. You really are incredibly good at completely missing the point. Ok, scale it to whatever you like. You've now got one stick of dynamite in the basement now. Does that make you feel better? Is your box in the basement going to contain that? If you make it much smaller, it won't be terribly useful as a power source. 30MW is a pretty small power source when generation is measured in gigawatts. There's a reason these are getting bigger.
The torque is strong with this one.
I wonder why they don't build huge 100 m high towers of flywheels that are supported by hydraulic bearings underground. These towers could be rotating at reduced rpms to avoid complicated shield structures
You could but the key feature of flywheels is the energy stored is proportional to the angular velocity *squared*. So a lighter-weight, fast spinning flywheel is 'better' than a heavy, slow moving flywheel.
The big SGI computer I once used had a flywheel UPS.
Wow 5 - 20 percent loss per hour? That makes it seem like batteries are the future.
Flywheel storage should be used for overnight discharges. It only needs to provide power for 12 hours at most.
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.
PLEASE do not say megawatts when referring to the storage of energy. The only unit to refer to such is Wh or watt hours. Thank you!!!!!
Flywheels have so low energy per dollar, that Watt is more relevant than Watt-hour. These are for short-term balancing, not hours.
@thomasgade226 Lol One is a measure of power output, the other is a measure of a store of power. They can be two completely different amounts for the same system. It makes zero sense to conflate one with the other, unless one's intention is to spread confusion or misinformation.
I think of flywheel batteries more like capacitors. Accumulators see a lot of *obvious* use but capacitors are used as lower level components, quick charge and discharge but low storage.