Using Flywheels to Meet Peak Power Grid Demands

hackertourist writes "A novel type of electricity storage was recently added to the New York power grid. The unit, supplied by Beacon Power, uses flywheels to store energy. This system is intended to replace gas turbines in supplying short-term peaks in power demand (also known as frequency regulation). It can supply up to 20 MW, using 200 flywheels." If you can't afford a 200-flywheel system, you can always get a racetrack-ready Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid, which has a single energy-storage flywheel that can give you a 160 HP burst of power when you need a little extra oomph.

Comments

and if you use maglev bearings

[Spy Handler]

and suck the air out of the housing, the stored energy lasts forever!

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[SpiralSpirit]

actually probably only until the heat death of the universe.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[robthebloke]

From the article: Beacon Power's spinning flywheels, which are made of carbon fiber and levitated in a vacuum by magnets, absorb energy from the grid and discharge 1 megawatt for as much as 15 minutes

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

these systems aren't even practical without both of those design features. bearings are costly maintenance problems and flywheel velocity is too high to tolerate contact with gases. they have to operate in vacuum with no physical contacts.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[gblackwo]

The discs do appear to be parallel to the ground so keep in mind that depending on which way they are spinning and which hemisphere they are in, the Coriolis effect will either help or hurt them.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Hijacked Public]

That is why you use the maglevs, so you don't contribute to the heat death.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[ron_ivi]

I thought the magnets induce currents which drains (a little) energy.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

The Coriolis effect is far too small to have any significant impact on these.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[blueg3]

In much the same way that putting a one-pound weight in your car reduces its fuel economy.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

No, after 10^36 years, half the protons should have decayed, so it would fall apart long before that.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[el3mentary]

The Coriolis effect is far too small to have any significant impact on flywheels this small, it only really has an effect on large scale systems such as cyclonic storms and even then it's amplified due to the proximity to the equator.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

The Coriolis effect goes to zero near the equator and is a maximum at the poles, but otherwise the poster is correct.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[localman57]

No, it's ok. See, this is for generating electricity. It's mosly the electrons that move around. I don't think we really need the protons that much.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this similar to Formula F1 KERS I believe it stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery System? Something than runs from the drive train somewhere I could research it and not ask dumb questions.. >:-D

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[VortexCortex]

The discs do appear to be parallel to the ground so keep in mind that depending on which way they are spinning and which hemisphere they are in, the Coriolis effect will either help or hurt them.

Uhhhg. Depending on the direction of the disks' spin they are slowing or speeding our planet's rotation!

I feel obligated to link you here.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[SETIGuy]

Since they start from a stop and will eventually end up stopped, the net effect on the rotation of the earth will be zero.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[robthebloke]

IINAE, but no. KERS recovers energy from the braking of the cars, and then lets you re-use that energy to gain an extra 80bhp for sections of the lap. In the 2009 season, Williams tried to use a flywheel system (whereas others, notably ferrari, mclaren etc) made use of batteries for storage. In 2010 The teams agreed not to use KERS, and Williams then sold their flywheel system to Porsche for use in one of their road cars (GT3 I think?). This year, no team in F1 is using a flywheel system - they are all battery based. In effect, you can think of a flywheel as nothing more than a battery of sorts (except it stores electrical energy as kinetic motion). KERS is more than a battery - it is the energy recovery system (located in the braking system), the battery (or flywheel, although no one is using one this year), and the electric motor used to deliver the extra 80bhp.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[robthebloke]

Although having just said all of that, I guess the answer is they are actually very similar in principle yes ;)

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[SETIGuy]

Yes, there will be dissipative currents in the flywheel itself and the surrounding structure if it is conductive, unless the flywheel is superconducting. You also need a means to input and extract the energy. That could be done through the suspension magnets, or through smaller magnets on the flywheel, and coils on the structure. There will be some losses there as well. Probably more loss than a capacitor bank, but less than a bank of batteries.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Andy Dodd]

As described by robthebloke - It's a component in some KERS systems but not all.

The basics of KERS are known in the general auto industry as regenerative braking. It's a fairly common thing and is one of the largest benefits of hybrid vehicles. It's why hybrid vehicles are often matched in highway mileage by some traditional vehicles, but they crush traditional vehicles in city mileage (primarily because they don't take that mileage hit from stop-and-go driving, which wastes a lot of energy heating the brakes in traditional vehicles.

Most hybrid systems take the approach of using the energy storage system to permit a lower-power engine to be used in a vehicle without affecting drivability in most situations. This is why hybrid has such bad connotations among gearheads.

The hybrid systems in F1 cars and that Porsche are constructed with a different goal - keep the high-power engine, but augment it with energy storage to improve your lap times on a twisty/turny track that has lots of braking and acceleration. They often call it KERS to avoid the negative connotations of hybrid vehicles with gearheads, even though in reality, it's the exact same approach except with some alterations in the design parameters and goals.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[robthebloke]

I'm no physicist, but I think AC is right.
The protons are an important component of the matter that the flywheel and the magnets are made of....
I'd assume that the electrons aren't involved much until the (matter making up the) flywheel starts rotating through a magnetic field, thus converting the kinetic motion back into an electrical current.... ?

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[blair1q]

maglevs aren't loss-free. eddy currents in the conductive elements. you'd have to get it to superconduct as well. then you might have perpetual motion, or as close to it as quantum losses will allow.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[blair1q]

The smaller you make the mechanical losses in the system, the larger the relative contribution of coriolis effects becomes.

But since coriolis effects are static for a given angular momentum, latitude, and attitude, the force on the bearing would be constant so as long as the bearing surfaces are out of contact you're good.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on your comment, I don't think you actually know what Heat death of the universe is.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[tibit]

The assembly would also need to be made non-conductive, otherwise I presume that the presence of Earth's magnetic field will slowly brake it due to eddy currents.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[tibit]

The Coriolis effect doesn't affect the energy stored in a closed system, right?

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[gblackwo]

Essentially, the Earth's rotation will put a net torque on the disc since it is parallel to the ground. It will affect the disc either negatively or positively depending on it's direction of spin.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[afidel]

Supercaps would seem a much better solution than either batteries or flywheels for that kind of short charge/discharge cycle.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[PopeRatzo]

No, after 10^36 years, half the protons should have decayed, so it would fall apart long before that.

And the warranty is only for 10^35 years.

Typical.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[VolciMaster]

If you're drawing that much of a vacuum, then you'd have a good insulator for your superconducting magnet

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Hognoxious]

Protons are the opposite of electrons, so the less of them the better.

At least neutrons just get in the way.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[camperdave]

You still need to power the maglevs. A spinning flywheel in the Earth's magnetic field means induced eddy currents within the flywheel, which means heat loss. Also, a spinning flywheel will want to maintain its orientation in the universe, so as the Earth turns on its axis, the axis of the flywheel needs active adjustment; again more loss. The material from which the flywheel is made, and the material from which the containing chamber are made will sublimate in a vacuum, thus degrading the vacuum. Thus you have friction. That is assuming you can maintain a vacuum for billions of years in the first place. No, flywheels are a poor choice for long term energy storage.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Hijacked Public]

And based on yours I don't think you a) recognize sarcasm; b) know that energy isn't 'lost' as far as the universe is concerned.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[budgenator]

According to wikipedia, gyroscopes are not effect by the coriolos forces

In order to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth without the complication of the dependence on latitude, Foucault used a gyroscope in an 1852 experiment. The gyroscope's spinning rotor tracks the stars directly. Its axis of rotation is observed to return to its original orientation with respect to the earth after one day whatever the latitude, not subject to the unbalanced Coriolis forces acting on the pendulum as a result of its geometric asymmetry. Foucault Pendulum

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[jo_ham]

They use supercaps as part of the system - there are big high voltage warnings that you need to put on the car when the system is charged, since it can seriously lash out and bite you if the car is just off-track and you're the first to touch it. There's a video on youtube somewhere of one of the pit crew being thrown back when he took a hit from the KERS system without wearing his insulating gloves.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[ChrisMaple]

energy isn't 'lost' as far as the universe is concerned.

The concept of entropy is lost on you.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[ChrisMaple]

As long as they are running, they'll make the day either longer or shorter.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

Entropy doesn't involve the loss of energy, just the distribution.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[tibit]

So, ha, I learned something again. I never thought about how a spinning disc in a rotating frame of reference will be affected, and that there will be a torque on it. I've found the derivations already done. I would have to redo them since I'm not 100% sure that I understood what is meant by torque (is the torque meant to be a component along the axis of rotation). It looks hopeful, tough.

Alas, all that it takes to fix the problem is -- apparently -- to make the gyro spherical.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, he's doing OK. The difference between energy and entropy is what is lost on you.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[i_b_don]

Re: a flywheel's rotational momentium

That's an interesting point.... so the engineering solution is to upend the flywheel like a Farris wheel and angle it in the direction of the earth's rotation. But I wonder how much of an effect this would really have if you kept the flywheel planer to the earth's surface? This seems like a complicated but simple question at the same time. The desire for the flywheel to maintain it's angular momentum would lead to more force (and therefore friction) on the rotation barring, but it should not otherwise effect the speed of the flywheel (I think). So the loss would result from the barring turning some of that energy into heat due to increased friction. So the real interesting question is the optimization of resources (aka money), in asking which is cheaper over the long haul... to build the flywheel upright (like a Farris wheel) or to build it horizontal/flat. The upright method would cost more initially but would perhaps not lose the 0.01% of energy each hour (or whatever the number is) from the earth spinning effect? What is the break even time, etc.

d

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[Hal_Porter]

This would be an excellent anti car jacking technology. When you brake at the lights the external door handles would be charged. And you could fire charged darts at people who look like they might be thinking of becoming squeegee merchants - the car would track what you are looking at and if you gave them a look of disapproval it would fire a charged dart to incapacitate them.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[symbolset]

Maybe they should have skipped the fancy magnet bearings and just made really huge smooth very massive flywheels that turn much more slowly. Like say almost half the width of that site in diameter, out of something cheap like steel reinforced concrete. Engineers get so excited about their advanced materials these days that they forget the simple things like if you're storing energy as angular momentum the more mass you have, and the greater the distance the mass from the axis, the slower you can go to store the same amount of energy. Start turning a few thousand tons on a disk 30 meters wide and a lot of the finer engineering challenges might just magically go away.

Ah, but where's the fun in that?

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[camperdave]

Well, just to throw some more problems in the pot, you've got tidal effects on the rotor which may throw off the balance, as well as shock waves from asteroid and meteor impacts. There's also ice ages and plate tectonics to deal with. Parallel to the Earth's axis solves part of the rotational momentum issue, however the Earth is still rotating around the Sun (23.5 degree difference off the Earth's axis), the sun is rotating around the Milky way (60 degrees off the ecliptic) and the Milky Way is moving who knows which way. There's an aweful lot of stuff that can happen between now and the heat death of the Universe.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[CubicleView]

If the duration of storage is all that's important you could use a rock and a mountain.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[AK Marc]

These aren't gyroscopes, they are flywheels. As such, they wouldn't be free floating and would be subject to a number of effects that wouldn't affect a free-spinning gyroscope. Unless you housed it in a container that allowed it to spin freely, but I would imaging any gains in that would be offset by the increased difficulty in extracting the power.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[turgid]

Also, a spinning flywheel will want to maintain its orientation in the universe

Are you insinuating that there is an Absolute Frame of Reference, young man?

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[RockDoctor]

As long as they are running, they'll make the day either longer or shorter.

Not quite. While your flywheel(s) is(are) being spun-up(down) they would speed up or slow down the day, the sign of day-change depending on the orientation of the flywheel axis w.r.t. the Earth's rotation axis.

Hmmm - flywheels with an axis orthogonal to the Earth's spin axis wouldn't have this effect. Or to be more precise, it would have COS(inclination angle) effect.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[An Onerous Coward]

My recollection is that lighter, faster ones hold more energy. The energy stored goes up proportional to the weight of the flywheel, but proportional to the square of the velocity.

Re:and if you use maglev bearings

[camperdave]

Also, a spinning flywheel will want to maintain its orientation in the universe

Are you insinuating that there is an Absolute Frame of Reference, young man?

Up until a few moments ago, before reading up on the Gravity Probe B experiments, I would have said, with respect to rotation, yes.

Cool, energy arbitrage

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Buy low (spin up the wheels), sell high (discharge the wheel energy)

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[Anonymous Coward]

That actually sounds awesome. If there was a home version of this so you could buy electricity off-peak and then when in peak hours it would spin up the flywheel instead of pulling from the grid. It would also go hand in hand with solar cells/wind turbines so that excess energy during sunny/windy days could be stored in the flywheel system and then discharged at night/clouds/no wind times.

I would buy one.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[xaxa]

Look up pumped storage hydroelectric power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[SETIGuy]

Basement flywheels have been considered for solar or wind energy storage, but as with any energy storage, if the energy is released suddenly in a small volume, you've got a bomb on your hands. You certainly wouldn't want to skimp on maintenance for such a device.

Flywheels used to be used for energy storage on farms before electrification. Often for pumping ground water. The classic farm windmill would be hooked to a gas motor with a flywheel and a pump. The motor had a governor to cut the fuel/air intake and spark if the flywheel was above a specific RPM. In no wind, and no pumping load, the motor might fire every 100 revolutions. If the wind was fast enough the motor might not fire at all. When pumping was needed energy would first be extracted from the flywheel, then the motor would start firing. Pumping moved the water to secondary energy storage (a water tower). Of course, it's all done with electric motors now.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[TheRaven64]

It's not a new idea. As another poster pointed out, there are hydroelectric storage systems that do exactly that. There's a lake not far from here that is filled by pumping water up hill at off-peak times, and then emptied to generate power at peak times. It works well with things like nuclear power, that are good at providing base load but can't be ramped up for high demand. It also helps things like solar and wind, where the peak supply and peak demand are not always at the same time.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[compro01]

Problem with that is that it requires epic amounts of water and geography that cooperates to store that water at a sufficient height.

You need about 367,000 litre-metres (367,000 litres of water raised 1 metre, or any equivalent product) to store 1 kilowatt-hour, and that's not accounting for losses either.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[CohibaVancouver]

I would buy one.

The question is whether your driver is cost savings, or the coolness factor & being good for the planet. Because if it's cost savings, you'll likely never see a payback - The cost of an expensive home flywheel along with solar cells and a wind turbine will probably exceed the hard dollar power savings you'll see...

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[Rolgar]

Might take awhile to pay itself off. Discover ran an article that priced a unit at $800 for one small flywheel.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[Muad'Dave]

I _love_ hit-and-miss engines! Not only do they not fire if turning over a certain RPM, the exhaust valve is held open so that there are no compression forces - only crankshaft and piston drag. Those engines are designed to run weeks on a tank of gas (and cooling water - they usually use evaporative cooling, so you have to fill them up with water).

In this video you can hear the exhaust pipe 'gasping' as it freewheels and the engine firing with a 'pop'. The red tank toward the tongue of the trailer is the coolant tank. Note that the flywheels are turning - they look strange due to the video framerate.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[Gibbs-Duhem]

I have heard from electric companies that they have absolutely no problem with this. People doing "energy arbitrage" are essentially helping the power companies even out the grid, which means said power company doesn't have to turn on the expensive natural gas generators as often (or purchase less natural gas power when they are on). You're just getting into the business of providing space and equipment to do grid leveling informally.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[VVrath]

Would that be the Dinorwig Pumped Storage Power Station?

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[TheRaven64]

I was actually thinking of this one, which is quite a bit smaller. I'm not sure how old I was when I saw it, but since I went around Trawsfynydd on the same trip, it can't have been very old - although possibly Trawsfynydd had already shut down and was just a museum at that point. And, looking at the map, it's not very close to me, except in comparison to how far it was from where I was living when I went there...

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[jeremymiles]

I did that trip too, about 25 years ago. Trawfynydd was still running then. (You're not from the Potteries, are you?)

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[TheRaven64]

I was actually living in south Devon at the time, but my father's company got a contract writing control software for glass toughening plants in Wales one summer, so the company put us all up in a hotel. My mother and I spent the time doing touristy things, and my father joined in most weekends. I went down coal mines, into power stations, and on a lot of steam railways (I was totally obsessed by Thomas the Tank Engine, so I must have been about 8 or 9).

I moved to Swansea for university, and stayed here afterwards once I realised that I can earn enough consulting a couple of days a month to cover my cost of living, so I get to pick only interesting projects to work on.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[Roblimo]

If coolness is your main motive, buy the Porsche. Even without a flywheel, a 911T is much cooler than a Toyonda Prinsight or some boring energy storage boxthing in the basement. And a flywheel that can give 160 HP coming out of a turn? My Jeep Cherokee's 4.0 L6 is only rated at 190 HP total. Oh my.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[budgenator]

Using a flywheel in an individual user's home application is probably too exotic, good old nickel-iron battery are more likely to be used, not the most efficient, but tolerate tonnes of abuse, last nearly forever, and require no exotic strategic metals.

Re:Cool, energy arbitrage

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Yeah I've known about the reservoir method for energy storage. I wonder how the land area use compares between the reservoir vs the flywheel idea for similar amounts of energy storage. With the flywheel I imagine you could have some chance of increasing the density - making bigger wheels or stacking them in a building - and that's not an obvious option with hydroelectric. Also, the reservoir requires having a good land configuration and the flywheel method is probably more flexible.

Now I've got myself imagining a building full of big flywheels, maybe 4 stories stall.... oh no, an earthquake, the flywheels are breaking loose... the town down the hill never knew what hit them.

New tech?

[Mabbo]

My grandfather was a manager with the utilities department for the city of Oshawa, Ontario. He described using this exact technology 60 years ago- a giant wheel maintaining momentum to keep the output predictable despite unpredictable input. Mind you, I don't think he was working on the 20MW range...

Re:New tech?

[bluefoxlucid]

So, a mechanical capacitor?

Re:New tech?

[ottothecow]

Flywheels aren't new at all...but there was a lot of NIMBY paranoia about flywheels breaking loose and roaming the countryside. I can see how a giant steel cylinder rolling around with a ton of stored energy might be bad, but fail to see how that would occur when mounted underground in concrete with a vertical axis.

In the case of these things, there seem to be many small ones (less risk if one "escapes") and something tells me that carbon fiber disks that are carefully stabilized and levitated in a vacuum while spinning incredibly fast...would break into a thousand pieces the second they left containment rather than rolling down the street and through someone's house.

Re:New tech?

[ron_ivi]

Also in use in vehicles since the 50's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus

Rather than carrying an internal combustion engine or batteries, or connecting to overhead powerlines, a gyrobus carries a large flywheel that is spun at up to 3,000 RPM by a "squirrel cage" motor. .... ...
Fully charged, a gyrobus could typically travel as far as 6km on a level route at speeds of up to 50 to 60 km/h, ...
Charging a flywheel took between 30 seconds and 3 minutes;

Sounds nicer than most electric cars.

Re:New tech?

[drinkypoo]

That's very different. For instance one way that power fluctuations can be handled in an extremely complete manner is to use a motor-flywheel-generator set in direct connection as a power filter, with attendant losses in efficiency that you can imagine. IIRC at least one chip fab is/was protected in this fashion. This is about using flywheels like batteries.

Re:New tech?

[plut4rch]

The JET tokamak has had a couple of huge flywheels to provide the power to its field coils since the early 1980s, and those are around 400MW peak output. True the pulse only lasts around half a minute or so, but it's still very impressive. Each flywheel has a moment of intertia of something around 14 million kgm^2. This may not even be that relevant to TFA but I thought it might be interesting.

Re:New tech?

[Nadaka]

Ranges on EV these days are 30 to 300 km rather than 6.

Re:New tech?

[kevinNCSU]

..but there was a lot of NIMBY paranoia about flywheels breaking loose and roaming the countryside.

God, am I the only one who wants to live in a world where this actually happens and you see a bunch of ME's from the power plant with yellow hard hats on sprinting after it yelling "Shit-shit-shit-SHIT! -*crushes car* - SORRY! - shit-shit-shit-shit!"

Re:New tech?

[MozeeToby]

Yeah, I think I'll take a Lithium ion battery in my trunk before I take a 3 ton hunk of steel spinning at 900km/h. That's a lot of energy, and unlike a battery, that energy has to go somewhere if it breaks.

Re:New tech?

[TheRaven64]

One of my physics teachers at school used to work in a power station for a bit. He showed us some pictures of a 'fuse' that they used. When I think of a fuse, I think of a small, thin, piece of wire. This was a large copper bar. He also had some pictures from when it blew - the entire bar was vaporised. When people talk about MWs and GWs, the numbers don't seem real. When you see lumps of copper being instantly turned to gas, you get a real feeling for the amount of power involved.

Re:New tech?

[goodmanj]

My worry isn't rolling stones, it's shrapnel. Beacon Power's flywheels store 25 kwh of electrical energy. If the rotor fails, this energy will be released in a fraction of a second, causing an explosion with the same energy as 20 kg of TNT. But TNT releases most of its energy in the form of heat, which is imperfectly converted to kinetic energy, while the flywheels will release pure kinetic energy. And it's kinetic energy that kills people. You'd better hope the engineer who designed the metal casing for the flywheel knew what he was doing!

Re:New tech?

[kj_kabaje]

Is that like the taco bus that comes by every so often?

Guess I'm hungry.

Re:New tech?

[Dancindan84]

Most EVs these days aren't 30' long and capable of comfortably seating 90 people. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison to look at the range on a city bus vs. a Nissan Leaf. Also, those 6 KM range buses were in service 58 years ago.

Re:New tech?

[catmistake]

Thx for posting. I, as well, don't understand why slashdot editors incist on publishing false information. Flywheels are not novel in the electrical grid. I know they've been used for sometime for maintaining brief power when switching from one power source to another.

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, batteries never fail exposively,,,

Re:New tech?

[dargaud]

I don't see a problem with an underground flywheel, but the idea of some heavy thing rotating at 30krpm in a _moving car_ makes me blink. I want to see a video of a(n even slow speed) crash before I want to see them on the road.

Re:New tech?

[ginbot462]

>> pure kinetic energy

Am I the only one that hears 80's syth with that?

Re:New tech?

[goodmanj]

I'm not sure, but I wanna know what you're thinking. Is there something on your mind?

Re:New tech?

[masterpenguin]

Luckily, in this case, having lived around Stephentown, N.Y. I can say there is likely little NIMBY paranoia as there's a whole lot of nothing except trees and hills. Therefore if a flywheel does break out, it won't have to travel far to find a large dirt mound to imbed itself into.

Re:New tech?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

If memory serves, the giant flywheel that MIT uses to spark their fusion test reactor is rigged with explosive charges to blow it to pieces if it ever came loose. I believe the calculations show that without detonating it, it would likely continue *through* several buildings before landing in the Charles River... could have been an urban legend though.

Re:New tech?

[rcw-home]

something tells me that carbon fiber disks that are carefully stabilized and levitated in a vacuum while spinning incredibly fast...would break into a thousand pieces the second they left containment rather than rolling down the street and through someone's house

Yes, it's basically the same as a bomb with a chemical energy potential equivalent to that of the kinetic energy stored in the flywheel being detonated in the flywheel's containment. If they haven't designed the facility with this in mind, shrapnel from one disintegrated flywheel could hit another flywheel, leading to a chain reaction of disintegrating flywheels that would shut down most or all of the facility. It sounds like they've put the flywheels mostly underground which, with enough spacing, should prevent this.

As for energy levels, if the 1-megawatt-for-15-minutes number in the article is for one flywheel, then that's equivalent to 215kg of TNT. If that's for all 200 flywheels combined, then one flywheel disintegrating is equivalent to 11kg of TNT.

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

My grandfather was a manager with the utilities department for the city of Oshawa, Ontario

My condolences for coming from The Shwa.

Re:New tech?

[DerekLyons]

This is about using flywheels like batteries.

The summary would lead you to believe that - but really what they're doing is using flywheels like capacitors. That is, for very short bursts of supplemental power rather than as a steady source.

Re:New tech?

[DerekLyons]

He described using this exact technology 60 years ago- a giant wheel maintaining momentum to keep the output predictable despite unpredictable input.

It's same general idea, but not really the same technology. He was using flywheels to smooth output voltage, while this system uses flywheels to smooth output power.

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd better hope that the PLC controllers aren't manufactured by Siemens...

WTF is wrong with engineers and their 1 dimensional thinking btw? Does it occur to anyone but me that the same infrastructure necessary to enrich uranium would serve a dual purpose as an energy buffer for peak energy demand? Further, the economies of scale could be exploited by using the same in-runner type brushless motors/alternators as the magnetic bearings.

WINNING

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read an article about using these in cars 20 years or so ago. The reason they use carbon fiber is that if it does fail, it just kinda shreds, whereas metal disks tend to break apart into 3 large pieces which go flying off and are much more dangerous.

Re:New tech?

[drinkypoo]

No, I took note of Beacon Power a number of years ago when they were talking about making UPSes, and you can sip power off them if necessary as well. There are numerous installations of their technology already. Probably someone is looking for funding right now.

Re:New tech?

[mpe]

In the case of these things, there seem to be many small ones (less risk if one "escapes") and something tells me that carbon fiber disks that are carefully stabilized and levitated in a vacuum while spinning incredibly fast...would break into a thousand pieces the second they left containment rather than rolling down the street and through someone's house.

I suspect your house would stand up better to being hit by one big lump of something than being in the path of what is, in effect, a very large shotgun.

Re:New tech?

[ottothecow]

My assumption is that the flywheel would break apart soon after becoming unbalanced and it would explode in all directions tangent to the rotation. If it stays inside its mini bunker, the broken apart bits of carbon should spread the force over a larger area/time than being slammed by a solid disk. If it comes out of containment before exploding, it will probably stay within the compound (and small pieces would each be acted upon by air resistance which would dissipate much more power) while a big metal cylinder might actually roll off into your house.

Re:New tech?

[Mindcontrolled]

It is indeed a different world. I come from a totally different field, but I am working with a couple of electrical engineers these days. When we had a talk about power supply systems, one of them made a comment that really opened up my eyes on how stuff works - "When you talk AC power lines - don't think about electrons moving around in wires. The energy is in the field. The wires are not for moving electrons, they are just guidance structures to direct the fields where we want them to go."

Re:New tech?

[Mindcontrolled]

That can be handled. Never worked with flywheels, but I had my fair share of work with ultracentrifuges. Basically the same thing - big ass rotors getting spun up in a vacuum to reach hundreds of thousands of G's of centripetal acceleration at the sample. I have seen one fail - scary, but it got contained. Mostly, the engineers know what they are doing. Didn't stop me from hauling ass every time one of the things made only one slightly weird sound, though...

Re:New tech?

[ArsonSmith]

As another one of those something to do with AOL CDs in the 90s we used a bit on a dremmel and spun them up to 20-30k rpm then let run across the floor, out the door and down the street a few hundred yards.

If they didn't self destruct that is.

Re:New tech?

[Dare nMc]

I don't know, if you have several gyro's around the car that could transfer energy this quickly, you could make a 4x4 with 6' of ground clearance, and a 6' wheelbase, that could still cornered like a go cart without rolling. Transfer the energy from the clockwise turning Gyro to the Counter clockwise one while turning left, swap for right turns. You could maintain equal force on every tire, every turn... Instead of having that dead-weight battery making turning more difficult, and accidents more likely...

Re:New tech?

[rjstanford]

I don't see a problem with an underground flywheel, but the idea of some heavy thing rotating at 30krpm in a _moving car_ makes me blink. I want to see a video of a(n even slow speed) crash before I want to see them on the road.

How about something rotating at just 10krpm but only thinly shielded and mounted right between your legs?

You know, like the engine on a motorcycle?

Re:New tech?

[goodmanj]

Now imagine an ultracentrifuge with 50 times as much energy as the one you've used. Still feel safe?

Re:New tech?

[GaryOlson]

Flywheel, schmywheel. One idiot machinist rammed the cutting bar into the clamping chucks of a 40HP 3 phase turning center at 4500 RPM, ripped one of the 8lb steel chucks off the 5/8" grade 8 bolts, jettisoned the chuck thru the safety bars on the window, thru the safety glass, thru the false ceiling, and embedded the metal object fully into the cinder block wall. Flywheels are just entertainment anymore.

Re:New tech?

[evilviper]

. But TNT releases most of its energy in the form of heat, which is imperfectly converted to kinetic energy, while the flywheels will release pure kinetic energy.

Hell, have you even HEARD of flywheels before? Your statement smacks of so much ignorance I can't believe you have the slightest comprehension of the subject...

Portable flywheels are spinning at very high speed in a vacuum, and made of carbon fiber. The instant the vacuum is broken, the friction from the air super heats the flywheel. It burns up almost instantly. There is NO SHRAPNEL. NO SHOCK WAVE. ETC. In fact it's basically a small volcano, and convection is very good at removing extremely high temperature gradients immediately. In short, if you aren't directly over it, you'll survive. Anything under it (eg steel) will be fine, too, if a bit cooked (yeah, plan on a new paint job), and thanks to convection, being a good distance above it is safe too, if uncomfortably warm, so no bridge collapse fear mongering, thanks... Chances are you'll need a clean pair of underwear, but will be untouched.

Now, for the large stationary flywheels, lower speeds and higher mass is used. Those you don't want to be near, but that's why they bury them underground, where they'll only destroy themselves, and make some glass.

Re:New tech?

[sjames]

IIRC, one of the design goals of the carbon fiber flywheels is that if they contact anything (like the sides of the vacuum chamber, they become big fuzzballs. That's still a lot of energy released all at once, but at least it's not rolling along the countryside.

Re:New tech?

[sjames]

Carbon flywheels become a big fuzzball if they fail like that, and so very quickly convert the kinetic energy to thermal.

I notice the facility is out in a big empty place. That's probably a good idea.

Re:New tech?

[goodmanj]

You've clearly got more experience than me, which is great, but keep in mind my goal here. I'm not trying to prove that flywheels cannot be made safe, I'm trying to show that the "NIMBY fears" about them aren't completely ludicrous. As you yourself said:

Now, for the large stationary flywheels, lower speeds and higher mass is used. Those you don't want to be near

and those are the kind we're discussing, not portable vehicle flywheels. Burying them underground will certainly help, but are you certain that in the extraordinarily complex collision/detonation between flywheel and outer wall, none of the material will escape at high speed?

I also question your assertion that even a portable flywheel will burn up instantly inside its containment: there's not enough air. Stoichiometrically, to burn up a small 10 kg carbon flywheel you need about 30 kg of oxygen, which means 100 cubic meters of air --- a couple of shipping containers. So there's a risk of high-speed pieces of carbon flying out several meters from the flywheel. For larger flywheels, increase the volume proportionally.

I personally believe that flywheels can be made safe, and I trust good engineering, but the point of the above is that making them safe isn't easy. I personally think their low energy density is more intractable problem, but my point is that people are right to be cautious about them -- just like any high power energy source.

Re:New tech?

[Mindcontrolled]

Pretty much, yeah. I don't have to hang around in the flywheel room, after all. Just put the thing into some decent concrete bunker and let it spin away. No need for anyone to stand right beside it - it contrast to my ultracentrifuge.

Re:New tech?

[AmiMoJo]

Just use it horizontally mounted at below ground level.

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

.... and that's why nobody invites EEs to parties.

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

But recharging the batteries takes longer than 3 minutes.

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

"When you talk AC power lines - don't think about electrons moving around in wires. The energy is in the field.

This is true for DC current as well, as much as coax cables, tx lines and so on.

Re:New tech?

[dargaud]

How about something rotating at just 10krpm but only thinly shielded and mounted right between your legs?

You know, like the engine on a motorcycle?

Not the same amount of inertia at all. Flywheels are designed to maximize inertia so they can rotate for a _long_ time. On the other hand a motor is designed to be reactive and change speed rapidly. Thus a motor can stop in less than a second, while a flywheel with shatter in shards of jump around at high speed. PS: I've had a CD explode in a reader and I don't want anything even remotely similar happen to a flywheel in my car !

Re:New tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

I toured the new AMD plant being built in Malta, NY and that's exactly what they have. The flywheel provides power for the two seconds it takes the insane number of massive diesel generators to power up, but that only happens if both of the power companies supplying it go down.

Add to windmills

[boristdog]

I've always thought a flywheel like this at the base of each windmill would be an awesome way to level out wind power fluctuations.

Re:Add to windmills

[Anonymous Coward]

This is already standard practice. In fact, the entire fucking propeller acts a big flywheel. They are massive and balanced radially.

Re:Add to windmills

[SETIGuy]

See my post above. Windmills used to be used in hybrid (wind+gasoline generation, flywheel+gravity storage) designs, back before we all had electricity at home.

novel?

[smoothnorman]

"A novel type of electricity storage was recently added to the New York power grid ..." Flywheels as primary energy storage devices have been in even the popular literature for several decades http://books.google.com/books?id=kgEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=popular+science+flywheel&source=bl&ots=9-KZjC7q03&sig=PgfEqfglwmcBdVGThAF7U4Vgsos&hl=en&ei=72jmTeanIqrbiALVtuTQCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=popular%20science%20flywheel&f=false/ and for capacitor-like mechanical smoothing operation since probably the first reciprocating engines. so let'say "novel for this particular application", (and i'm not so sure of that)

Re:novel?

[LWATCDR]

They where also used as a suppressor and UPS on mainframes. Some mainframes uses a big electric motor to turn a flywheel that was hooked to a generator to act as a voltage regulator. Very effective for brown outs and spikes. And yea I remember reading about them in PopSci in the 70s right down to the magnetic bearings, carbon fiber, and vacuum chamber. Also some pretty spectacular pictures of failures as well.

Re:novel?

[VortexCortex]

Just a quick Note: You only need the id=___ and pg=___ (book Id & page number) parameters to link to Google books (usually just everything before the second & character.

http://books.google.com/books?id=kgEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA41

Also you can make a link like this by doing this:
<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=kgEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA41"> this </a>

Re:novel?

[ShavedOrangutan]

I'd think a battery would be a lot simpler.

Re:novel?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was being done in 1967 on general electric mainframes, from what I understand; the motor-generator system was, in effect, a flywheel electric storage device for regulating power and providing a few minutes of electricity to allow proper system shutdown in event of complete power failure.

Re:novel?

[smoothnorman]

i got in trouble here the last time when i used google's URL shortener so i just thought wtf... but your tips are much appreciated, thankee

Re:novel?

[Amouth]

while it might be alot simpler - it is no where near as reliable - and will also degrade over a very short time.

Re:novel?

[LWATCDR]

Not really or as reliable. Since this was the 1960s or 70s you would have had lead acid batteries which suck. Also think of the size of a surge that you would have to have to destroy a large electric motor. The system used a large flywheel, generator, motor, and a diesel generator. When the power failed a after a short time a clutch engaged and the fly wheel started the diesel. These where all industral sized system and where super reliable.

capacity

[TheSHAD0W]

20 megawatts peak output? But how many megawatt hours?

Re:capacity

[cplusplus]

5, because they only produce peak output for about 15 minutes.

Re:capacity

[peragrin]

about 4 or so.

Full power only lasts for 15 minutes. however that is enough time to bring online a gas generator, or to push through a small spike. This would be useful to stablize small spikes giving you more time to bring online, or leave offline the generators.

Re:capacity

[berashith]

the article mentions ... 1 megawatt for as much as 15 minutes ... this is for each flywheel.

Re:capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

But could it also power something really small for several lifetimes?

Re:capacity

[drinkypoo]

No, the technology that they are using requires maintenance power. These are only useful when attached to the grid and being used to ride out surges in demand.

Re:capacity

[blair1q]

You mean 100 kW for 15 minutes, per flywheel.

Re:capacity

[TheBig1]

Sure, let's use one to power your wrist watch!

Re:capacity

[berashith]

well, I cut and paste from the article, but the math is obviously wrong, and I was wondering if anyone would comment. I think the blurb indicates a max of this particular companies products, which this installation doesnt involve the largest single unit. The "as much as 15 minutes" part seems to be relevant if you want to know the kW/h.

Re:capacity

[marcosdumay]

That could lead to some interesting dancing movements.

Gimbals

[TomorrowPlusX]

Dumb question, I suppose. But, given that the earth rotates, and given that the flywheels will have a huge angular momentum, are they gimbaled? The article says they're suspended in a vacuum, levitated on a magnetic field, which is cool. But if they're not gimbaled a huge amount of energy will be wasted fighting precession as the earth rotates.

I assume the people making these things are smart and know their shit. I'm just curious how a problem like this is solved. If not gimbals, what?

Re:Gimbals

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably licensed some Apple Magic(TM).

Re:Gimbals

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumber question: if one imagines a vast number of these flywheels buffering intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar at enough scale to power the US, will the flywheels slow the rotation of the Earth significantly?

 

Re:Gimbals

[Dunbal]

Superconductors, flux pinning, etc.

Re:Gimbals

[Dunbal]

It would take a heck of a lot of them to slow the rotation of the Earth enough to get back to where we were before the Japan and Chile earthquakes...

Re:Gimbals

[Brett Buck]

Oy Vey! - you orient the spin axis along true North.

     

Re:Gimbals

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

. Earth is slowing down That is why they need to add leap seconds, (yes, they effectively stop all the clocks in the world for a second) at the end of every year to sych the clocks with Earth's rotations.

Re:Gimbals

[bobbuck]

If that was a factor, wouldn't they just mount them parallel to the earth's axis?

Re:Gimbals

[david.given]

No --- because the torque you steal from the Earth as you spin them up gets dumped back into the Earth when they spin down again.

Re:Gimbals

[VortexCortex]

Dumber question: if one imagines a vast number of these flywheels buffering intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar at enough scale to power the US, will the flywheels slow the rotation of the Earth significantly?

... or speed it up depending on the direction of spin? Alternating directions in different units (turn every other unit upside-down?!) should combat this effect.

Re:Gimbals

[pclminion]

But if they're not gimbaled a huge amount of energy will be wasted fighting precession as the earth rotates.

What means this "fighting precession?". As the axis of rotation changes there will be a torque on the axle -- big deal, this simply exchanges angular momentum with the earth. You just need an axle which can withstand that torque, and it ain't much torque.

Re:Gimbals

[blair1q]

Nope. Then gravity torque gives you a mess.

They probably didn't mount them perfectly vertically. They probably also dynamically balanced them.

Re:Gimbals

[SETIGuy]

But if they're not gimbaled a huge amount of energy will be wasted fighting precession as the earth rotates.

You don't need to gimbal them. If oriented correctly you can draw energy from the rotation of the earth to fight the precession effects. Basically nearly all of the force that keeps the axis aligned is transmitted through the mounting, and only tiny amounts will be derived from the rotation. Induced currents will be a more significant source of losses.

Re:Gimbals

[TheRaven64]

They don't need to add leap seconds. If we didn't have leap seconds, it would take well over a thousand years before time drifted an hour out of sync with the sky, and if we still have such a large percentage of the human population on this planet that this divergence actually matters in a thousand years, then we're doing something very wrong.

Re:Gimbals

[Anonymous Coward]

yes they are gimbaled.

Re:Gimbals

[tibit]

I may be rusty on my dynamics, but will the flywheels actually lose energy if they are being constantly reoriented by applying radial force to their shafts via the maglev bearing? If you look at the kinetic energy of the flywheel, it is constant in spite of changes in angular momentum. Changing angular momentum requires zero net work when you integrate over proper time period(s).

Re:Gimbals

[_0xd0ad]

The really simple way to describe it is in terms of inertia. Like any spinning body, the earth has a moment of inertia (the figure skater is the example you always hear, but spinning in a rotating chair works just as well to demonstrate the point). It's really big, but it's possible to change it. Move a bunch of heavy stuff up to the top of a mountain, and just like a figure skater extending their arms, you'll have increased the earth's moment of inertia slightly. Well, spinning a really big flywheel will also increase the earth's moment of inertia slightly. Increasing the moment of inertia means that the rotational speed decreases.

But the key thing to remember is that both of them are reversible: move the heavy stuff back down to its original location or stop the spinning flywheel, and the earth's moment of inertia will be returned to the same as it was before too. There was never any effect on the actual energy stored in the earth as it rotated; you merely changed the form in which that energy was being expressed - you temporarily converted some of it from kinetic (rotational) energy into potential (stored) energy.

Re:Gimbals

[mpe]

Dumber question: if one imagines a vast number of these flywheels buffering intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar at enough scale to power the US, will the flywheels slow the rotation of the Earth significantly?

These things won't affect the Earth in any significent way. What's probably more an issue is how they would behave in an earthquake...

Re:Gimbals

[lennier]

Oy Vey! - you orient the spin axis along true North.

And that's how Santa raises the funds to underwrite his subversive wealth-redistribution operation. By holding the world's power supplies to ransom with a giant flywheel, which doubles as a bomb large enough to obliterate most of Canada and northern Siberia.

If you're extra-naughty, Santa might come to your house on Christmas Eve and give you a top that never stops spinning.

Re:Gimbals

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimbels is gone, Marge, long gone. You're Gimbels.

Re:Gimbals

[nomorecwrd]

If the axis is perfectly oriented to the geographic north pole, then there is no problem.

Re:Gimbals

[bobbuck]

What is "gravity torque?"

Alternatives

[macraig]

Does an obese cat in a giant hamster wheel count as a flywheel? No? What if I just hooked up a DC generator to it and dangled some liver on a stick? How many Watts could I get?

Re:Alternatives

[VortexCortex]

Does an obese cat in a giant hamster wheel count as a flywheel? No? What if I just hooked up a DC generator to it and dangled some liver on a stick? How many Watts could I get?

In my experience, 2.21 jigga-watts (depending on the viciousness of the large dog behind the cat).

After reaching an angular velocity of 88mph, you can send the device back in time to double your energy output -- The process yields unlimited Infinite energy (well, except for the limits of the world's production of meow-mix and cat-litter).

Re:Alternatives

[vlm]

Does an obese cat in a giant hamster wheel count as a flywheel? No? What if I just hooked up a DC generator to it and dangled some liver on a stick? How many Watts could I get?

One horsepower is about the average sustained power output of a horse (imagine that!). There are always substantial energy conversion losses, and a fat cat is non-optimal compared to a born and bred working horse, so I feel comfortable saying you'll get about 500 watts per horsepower.

Long term power output probably scales as weight, short term probably as surface area. A fat cat probably weighs more than 10 pounds and a hard core work horse probably weighs more than 1000 pounds. So I feel confident that you'll get somewhat less than 1/100th of a horsepower out of a fat cat.

Doing all the estimating in my head, I think it very realistic for a fat cat to sustainably long term generate about 5 watts. Enough to charge an ipod or run a cablemodem or an ethernet switch. A bit weak to run a giant modern laptop, but enough to slowly charge it....

If you could herd a hundred cats, like those crazy cat ladies, you could probably run a nice big screen TV off catpower.

Re:Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the giant hamster wheel counts as a flywheel. The obese cat's mass doesn't contribute to the energy stored, because the cat isn't spinning.

Re:Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Does an obese cat in a giant hamster wheel count as a flywheel? No? What if I just hooked up a DC generator to it and dangled some liver on a stick? How many Watts could I get?

CORN......

Re:Alternatives

[Quiet_Desperation]

If you could herd a hundred cats,

Well, now, *there's* your problem.

Re:Alternatives

[M8e]

The obese cat would be spinning if he was cycling on an exercise bike instead of running in a giant hamster wheel.

Re:Alternatives

[ChinggisK]

I told you yesterday, you're looking for 1.21 jigga-watts!

Re:Alternatives

[dotancohen]

Does an obese cat in a giant hamster wheel count as a flywheel? No? What if I just hooked up a DC generator to it and dangled some liver on a stick? How many Watts could I get?

One, followed by "...the fuck are you doing?"

Re:Alternatives

[rjstanford]

The obese cat would be spinning if he was cycling on an exercise bike instead of running in a giant hamster wheel.

Thanks to their quadruped nature, cats can actually spin two exercise bikes, for bursts up to double their rated output.

Well, they don't, but they could if they wanted to.

Re:Alternatives

[blindseer]

I told you yesterday, you're looking for 1.21 jigga-watts!

With all this time travel going on I know it's difficult to keep track but I won't hear what you told me yesterday until tomorrow. ...

Or something like that.

What's the cost?

[jamesl]

Why don't these alternative energy/power storage articles ever include cost comparisons? What do these flywheels cost to buy and operate compared to what they're replacing?

Re:What's the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what they cost, but it looks like they're trying to compete with GE gas turbines.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110525-708195.html

I was trying to figure out why GE was running new ads for their gas turbine technology during FX's X-Men rundown this week. I guess this flywheel stuff is why (particularly the part about the purchase by the NY grid).

Re:What's the cost?

[bluefoxlucid]

The humans making the decisions don't understand Go. They're not even engineers, so they haven't seen all the numbers. Hell, even engineers look at cost comparisons, but not total impact: they may look at the CO2 output of a particular form of power generation, and the price, and see that it is manageable and cheaper and better; but they don't see that the CO2 output of building the damn thing divided by its useful lifetime is much higher than a heavy polluter coal plant that lasts much longer and is easy as hell to build.

Most people are stuck in the corner, trying to save one thing in isolation, and then wanting to have everything, and still as separate pieces. They do not back off to see the whole, and make exchanges to stay overall ahead. The whole of the board is a mystery to them, and they only jump from section to section, trying to fight small local battles without seeing how they hurt other positions.

Re:What's the cost?

[h4rr4r]

but they don't see that the CO2 output of building the damn thing divided by its useful lifetime is much higher than a heavy polluter coal plant that lasts much longer and is easy as hell to build.

It's not. Please let us know why you think it is.

Re:What's the cost?

[drinkypoo]

They compete with batteries. They are more expensive than crappy dirty ones and cheaper than fancy relatively clean ones. They are made with steel containment vessels and contain a bunch of electromagnets which you and I know as being made of wire. You can check pricing of maglev bearings online. The flywheels are made of carbon fiber so that if they should for some reason contact the housing, which as I recall is about an inch thick steel unit, they shred themselves into cotton candy or confetti or something like that instead of releasing their energy explosively. The various materials they're made of means you can assume they have a fairly high energy cost of production. The units are small enough to be ganged in shipping containers.

Re:What's the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

The game of Go might be a good analogy to systems engineering? Some industries get it (ie, aircraft) and include multi-disciplinary engineers all through a project to look at interactions.

Re:What's the cost?

[bluefoxlucid]

It depends on what system you're looking at. Old solar panel technology took a large amount of nasty chemical pollutants to make, and produced a hell of a lot of liquid toxic waste output. I think our solution has been to dump it in the water supply... newer processes are cleaner, though.

It's like buying a fleet of electric or hybrid cars for their "environmental impact," while Toyota won't release statistics on how much energy goes into building one and how much pollution it produces. There's no total lifetime numbers for something as innocuous as CO2, which leads many to speculate that Toyota might keep such things secret because the total CO2 production for an electric hybrid exceeds the total CO2 production for a 25mpg Sedan over its expected lifetime. Less not knowing, and more not caring because the numbers in front of you support your foregone conclusions already.

Re:What's the cost?

[david.given]

Well, these are energy storage units rather than energy generation units. The electricity is generated elsewhere by cheap baseload generators and these flywheel units store it until it's needed to makeup shortfall by peak load. This gives you enough time to spool up the slow-reacting baseload generators.

What they're replacing is probably gas turbines, which are expensive to run but have a very short reaction time and are generally used to meet peak loads. And gas turbines are generation units, so you can't really compare them directly.

Existing tech for energy storage is stuff like pumped storage ---you use surplus electricity to pump water from a low lake to a high one, and then it flows back through the turbine to generate electricity. I used to live near the Ben Cruachan pumped storage station. It can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can start up in 30 seconds, which is pretty damned impressive. This flywheel installation can generate 20MW for 15 minutes, so it's nowhere near the same league, but is likely to be vastly cheaper and a hell of a lot more portable, not requiring a mountain to install it in.

Re:What's the cost?

[h4rr4r]

It depends on what system you're looking at. Old solar panel technology took a large amount of nasty chemical pollutants to make, and produced a hell of a lot of liquid toxic waste output. I think our solution has been to dump it in the water supply.

That has nothing to do with co2. All commercially available solar panels have had payback times in co2 terms of less than 50% of their lifetimes.

It's like buying a fleet of electric or hybrid cars for their "environmental impact," while Toyota won't release statistics on how much energy goes into building one and how much pollution it produces. There's no total lifetime numbers for something as innocuous as CO2, which leads many to speculate that Toyota might keep such things secret because the total CO2 production for an electric hybrid exceeds the total CO2 production for a 25mpg Sedan over its expected lifetime. Less not knowing, and more not caring because the numbers in front of you support your foregone conclusions already.

You can figure out how much energy goes into making one, look at the price. A 25mpg sedan is going to probably cost more than a prius anyway, as it only gets 25mpg for a good reason. That is because it is heavy and made from more material generating more CO2 when it was produced.

A corolla might be better over the lifetime of the car in co2 terms vs a prius, but that 25mpg sedan won't. An electric car in fleet use might be even better, depends on source of that power.

Your talking points suck. Stop moving the goalposts and do some fucking math.

Re:What's the cost?

[hackertourist]

Not quite TFA, but here's a report from KEMA (pdf).

Re:What's the cost?

[pixelpusher220]

I suspect it's because these are not 'power generation' devices. They are simply batteries.

There will be infrastructure costs associated with building them but there is no 'fuel' or significant ongoing cost. At least no more so than a comparable power generation plant. So that washes in terms of cost.

By using renewable sources, like solar or wind, there also is no 'fuel' involved at all. This allows that intermittent renewable source to provide power when the source isn't producing directly.

Re:What's the cost?

[TheRaven64]

No one uses batteries on this scale. They compete with hydroelectric storage, where water is pumped up a hill to fill a lake. The environmental impact of such a system is large within the area of the lake, but relatively well contained.

Re:What's the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good method, even if a bit old... The flywheel was a mainstay of machine shops in the 1700 and 1800's. It's perfect for use with wind or solar that can change with weather. It lends itself nicely to generating electricity because rotation is something you already need to do.

Now that good clean MODERN nuclear power is in the "taboo" list again, what's left? Building a grid withthese stations to balance wind and solar is not a bad idea.

Ultimately all energy is from the Sun. Oil and coal is just million year old continents forests and fauna plowed under. A finite amount of energy is available daily. it's time for more severe measures for low emery devices, and devices that last longer. Benefits should be placed on off-grid resources... Developing solar device chargers or fuel cells from alcohol that can last 25 years or more. Smartphones, laptops, reading lighting are things that could be pulled off-grid quite easily. The biggest change is to redevelop a culture that works with the solar day, pulling society back from things like XBox 360 all nite that pulls MORE juice than a quality refrigerator. This is something the FCC could help with by severely restricting the Energy Star labeling for electronics.

I DON'T believe in smart meters or measured driving. It's almost exclusively tilted at making people pay more while companies get away with blanket contracts. The current proposals on those fronts almost exclusively hurt the folks that ALREADY made a choice to drive smaller, buy efficient to subsidize those that still buy the biggest vehicle they can get.

Re:What's the cost?

[vlm]

Your talking points suck. Stop moving the goalposts and do some fucking math.

Ahh of all my math classes at university, that was my favorite.

The problem is, the math is unclear.

For example, my wife's prius cost about 20K and I pay about 8 cents/KWh because I live in a civilized part of the country, so if every penny of the cost went to energy in its most polluting form, fossil fuel electricity, that would be about 250 megawatt-hr... at 2 pounds of CO2 per KWh at a fossil fuel plant, thats about half a million pounds of CO2 per "car cost equivalent of electricity". For the money I gave them, they literally cannot spew more than 500K-pounds of CO2 per prius as a very hard limit. Probably WAY the heck less. How much further? Who knows.

In comparison, if it runs 150K-miles, at 60 MPG, thats 2.5K-gallons of gas, at 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas, thats a cool 50K-pounds of CO2 out the tailpipe. Of a car that only weighs 3000 pounds.

From a purely economic standpoint, the prius can't be much fitter or much worse than a plain ole car. If it were, either the entire industry would have cut over, or it would have gone out of business. So its probably about the same. The only difference is buying GM detroit iron means you'd send an extra $5K to Saudi Arabia, where they spend it on one way airplane tickets landing in our skyscrapers, whereas buying Toyota hybrids means you'd send an extra $5K to Japan where they spend it on creepy animated films of women and tentacles, and, apparently, not on extra tall reactor tsunami seawalls. Personally I am better off with more tentacle pr0n than collapsing skyscrapers, and so is the planet due to less wasted CO2. So if you want to go far enough in your CO2 analysis, you have to budget in the CO2 effects of the middle eastern war for oil, or "the crusades" or whatever its called now.

You can do this math estimating in your head, but it still doesn't really answer the problem. Quoting paid PR spokesmen from both sides doesn't really answer anything either.

Re:What's the cost?

[gknoy]

All civilized men should study Geometry, Philosophy, and the game of Go.

The humans making the decisions don't understand Go. They're not even engineers, so they haven't seen all the numbers. Hell, even engineers look at cost comparisons, but not total impact....

While I've not studied Go nearly enough as a civilized person ought to (or even as much as I'd like to), I don't really see the connection. What do cost calculations of projects have to do with an understanding of Go? What aspect of understanding Go (which I clearly do not have) applies here, and is a direct consequence of studying Go (as opposed to fencing, chess, etc)?

Re:What's the cost?

[drinkypoo]

No one uses batteries on this scale.

Not yet, but they're working their way up there. EV batteries are supposed to be recycled into such solutions.

Re:What's the cost?

[Arlet]

Japan Wind Development has opened a 51 MW wind farm that incorporates a 34 MW sodium sulfur battery system at Futamata in Aomori Prefecture in May 2008.[7][9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-sulfur_battery

Re:What's the cost?

[k8to]

Looking at the price for CO2 cost is a lot more accurate than some might think. There's some research which shows that costs closely track energy used in production, and that in turn should closely track CO2.

Sure, some things deviate, like the priciest wine vs the cheapest, but for things like pens, cars, computers, where pricing pressure exists (even for most luxury cars!) it seems to mostly hold.

Re:What's the cost?

[Quiet_Desperation]

What do cost calculations of projects have to do with an understanding of Go?

Nothing. It's one of those things people say because they think it makes them sound smart.

It's like how MBAs in the 1990s made sure they were seen reading Tzu's The Art Of War.

Re:What's the cost?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Are you taking the Prius battery into account?

Re:What's the cost?

[vlm]

While I've not studied Go nearly enough as a civilized person ought to (or even as much as I'd like to), I don't really see the connection. What do cost calculations of projects have to do with an understanding of Go? What aspect of understanding Go (which I clearly do not have) applies here, and is a direct consequence of studying Go (as opposed to fencing, chess, etc)?

Worst case scenario it means the author support eastern mysticism and/or likes being "indie". If the author isn't completely ignorant of Go, sometimes it implies a class-ist outlook on humanity, as Go players cluster themselves into ranks and pretty much each rank can crush the rank below them and a lot of time is spent playing king of the mountain... Its interesting that humanity supports about 30 ranks of Go skill, as opposed to only about 2 in tic tac toe. Why not 100? Humans just don't have that much intelligence variation..

Best case scenario, it means the author knows there are other games that require intense pattern matching, and there are games that require intense memorization, and there are games that require intense long term strategic planning, but none require ALL THREE simultaneously quite as much as Go...

Re:What's the cost?

[bluefoxlucid]

Uh, more material means more CO2? Are you sure? Considering that the melting point of iron or steel or aluminum or titanium or incolnel varies by about 1200 degrees (1810F to start weakening incolnel, something like 400 to start weakening some grades of steel, various alloying will push that down to 300F or up to .. oh ...1810F, like the nickel-steel-lotsofotherstuff alloy Incolnel). Glass also takes a lot of energy, thus lots of CO2, and is somewhat less dense than steel: cheap green-tint lime glass softens around 1400F, but good quality clear glass doesn't start to melt until 3000F. Then there's plastics that are easier to flow chemically or thermally, depending on composition, although they're also far lighter; but the density-to-energy-required-to-form ratio isn't constant there.

Making a battery is harder than casting an aluminum engine. Lots of funny chemicals have to be produced, not just sulfuric acid and lead. Purity is important, somehow (battery technology is pretty ugly, and relies on the innards actually melting and doing other strange things). There are waste products which must be filtered out, isolated, contained, separated, shipped, reacted, stored, and disposed of safely, all of which takes energy.

The energy cost for blasting Aluminum into a liquid puddle, casting it in a mold, machining it, polishing it, and assembling it into an engine may be quite a bit higher than the energy cost of forming and cutting sheets of lead and plastic and adding water and sulfuric acid and stabilizers and terminals, especially since lead is heavy and made from more material yet has a very low melting point and is easily worked rather cool anyway; but what about producing all those chemicals and disposing of the toxic byproducts? There are no byproducts in machining an aluminum engine part; you put a tray under the work bench, you collect the metal particles, run it past an electromagnet to draw off any steel filings from the bits, and then dump it back in the melting vat to make another part. That's less transit than running tons and tons of chemicals all over the god damn world for specialist treating and disposal.

Seriously. The power to process more raw material of greater weight is automatically bigger? You don't understand anything about the engineering complexity of one job versus another. The power to produce a material of greater purity is much higher than the back-yard-with-a-blowtorch shit you need to roughly cobble together a mixture of boiling chemical soup that roughly makes a serviceable battery or a piece of steel plate mail. A stamped sword of melted iron is going to be much different than a forged sword of quality steel--cheap iron that's been heated and blasted properly, flowing it away from carbon and impurities, leaving a low-carbon steel with little silicon and sulfur and the like in it, which of course moves to the outside during the forging process anyway so you get nice, pure steel. Of course, the refining and forging processes will take much more time at extremely elevated temperatures, burning tons of fuel.

Purity. Not material. Heavy refined steel vs crude cast iron. Refined, consistent SLA battery with proper stabilizers and salt bridges vs lead and copper sheets in a vat of acid. These are where differences in energy use come from.

Re:What's the cost?

[glodime]

Retail car dealers would raise prices of popular models when they are in limited supply. So something trendy like a prius might fall into that priciest wine vs the cheapest category that deviates from your expectations.

Re:What's the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because cost is only one factor to consider, not to mention that a cost-benefit analysis assumes that all inputs for all options are factored into the prices.

Re:What's the cost?

[glodime]

It's like how MBAs in the 1990s made sure they were seen reading Tzu's The Art Of War.

I think that dates back to the 70's and 80's when Japan was seen as USA largest emerging economic competitor and all things Asian seemed exotic and trendy.

Re:What's the cost?

[Amouth]

hum this is an object spinning.. granted it might be massive and slow or lite and fast - this particular one seems to be carbon fiber so i'm going with lite and exceptionally fast.

but if you went the other way and just did massive and slow (say 100 tons and 2000 rpm) you would still have an amazing amount of force.. and your co2 emissions would be nothing more than the cost to produce 100 tons.. they would have to produce the metal for a new coal plant.. why not do this?

also note that why a coal plant is producing power from coal .. these fly wheels are just storing it - they don't where out like batteries and should have a much much longer usable life span..

Re:What's the cost?

[The Great Pretender]

Because it's not that simple, sadly. To have a cost comparison, you have to have an agreed basis. The idea would be a full life cycle analysis with no financial subsidies that confidently predicted material costs over 50-60 years. That would be great if we knew the operations and maintenance cost of all of these items (good rule of thumb is 80% of the cost is after the capital outlay). Also how do you compare moving electrons from place a to b via transmission lines to a pipe carrying LNG. What are the assumptions, what's going to happen to the price of copper? The list goes on. How does the exploration of new oil reserves affect the true cost of oil, especially given the hyperblown futures market. So I go back again to the point, for a comparative analysis, what's the baseline assumptions that the majority (note: I'm not even saying everyone) agree on? Until we get that, you will find issues (read bias) with everyone's numbers depending on which side of the fence they sit.

Re:What's the cost?

[radtea]

Why don't these alternative energy/power storage articles ever include cost comparisons?

For the same reason they are telling us the size of the flywheel in miles per hour (20 MW of "energy" storage? What?)

Re:What's the cost?

[h4rr4r]

Just compare cost. A prius cannot use more energy to make than it costs, that sets the upper bound. That 25MPG sedan is going to cost more.

Car steel is heavily refined, there is no low refined cheap stuff going into any cars.

Re:What's the cost?

[Quiet_Desperation]

You might be right. I just remember it coming to a real head in the 90s.

Re:What's the cost?

[sheepofblue]

My guess is they cost the same or more otherwise they would not require subsidies for implementation.

Re:What's the cost?

[mpe]

I used to live near the Ben Cruachan pumped storage station. It can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can start up in 30 seconds, which is pretty damned impressive. This flywheel installation can generate 20MW for 15 minutes,

440MW for 22 hours is nearly 35 TJ whereas 20MW for 15 minutes is 18 GJ. The actual mechanical energy stored in such a system would depend on the maximum and minimum speeds of the flywheel.

so it's nowhere near the same league, but is likely to be vastly cheaper and a hell of a lot more portable, not requiring a mountain to install it in.

Does the cost include being able to contain a flywheel failure? Since the units are so close together a single uncontained failure could be the end of the whole plant.

Re:What's the cost?

[swb]

Is the dollar cost of energy the right metric?

The energy inputs to the Prius are likely to be very inexpensive, very dirty energy sources -- like the coal the Chinese like to burn for electricity that powers much of the rare earth production that goes into Prius motors & electronics.

Re:What's the cost?

[mpe]

It's a good method, even if a bit old... The flywheel was a mainstay of machine shops in the 1700 and 1800's. It's perfect for use with wind or solar that can change with weather. It lends itself nicely to generating electricity because rotation is something you already need to do.

An 18th century steam engine (or even water wheel) was probably a more reliable source of power than current wind or solar. Wind power has actually been around for more than two thousand years, but still has the basic problem of being intermittent.

Re:What's the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

A big part of go is deciding how much resources to divert to different battles

Re:What's the cost?

[afidel]

Uh, plenty of places use batteries for 20MW for 15 minutes, that's a small to midsized datacenter.

Re:What's the cost?

[SuseLover]

But why carbon fiber? Isn't it very lightweight? I thought a flywheel needs to be HEAVY - the more mass, the more energy involved. Why not some nonferrous (non-magnetic) metal or granite? There could be small magnetic areas for the levitation bearing though. I can't imagine this really being practical on a large scale. There must be better energy storage techniques than this. With all the money wasted on all these failed "green/renewable" technology experiments now, fusion could be a lot closer to reality.

Re:What's the cost?

[drinkypoo]

But why carbon fiber? Isn't it very lightweight?

Think about that for more than ten seconds, please.

I can't imagine this really being practical on a large scale.

I couldn't have imagined solar thermal with liquid sodium, but then, I'm not a physicist. Are you?

Re:What's the cost?

[aXis100]

Kinetic energy is 1/2 m * v ^2.

Increased mass will only increase energy lineary, but the squared velocity term means that if you double the speeds you get four times the energy.

Re:What's the cost?

[drinkypoo]

A 25mpg sedan is going to probably cost more than a prius anyway, as it only gets 25mpg for a good reason. That is because it is heavy and made from more material generating more CO2 when it was produced.

The Prius is not particularly svelte at 3042 lb. The Prius uses a lot of "aluminium and ultra high-tensile steel". The majority of aluminum is refined using a toxic and energy-intensive process. While I'm no metallurgist, steel is made harder by working and/or by adding additional metals to the steel. Japanese cars have long been made from recycled American cars, which are (or more to the point, were) made with our mild steel. High-tensile steels contain additional metals which increase the toxicity of the manufacturing process through both primary and secondary effects (and so on...)

As well, a significant portion of the weight of the typical luxury car is actually asphalt installed for sound deadening and mass distribution, which for all its faults (huh huh) is probably significantly less energy-intensive than steel or batteries no matter how you measure it, unless you bring tensile strength into the equation.

A corolla might be better over the lifetime of the car in co2 terms vs a prius, but that 25mpg sedan won't. An electric car in fleet use might be even better, depends on source of that power.

This is true, but not for the reason you suggest. It's because relatively little of the energy of the average car is expended in its production, and the Prius is not so very much more car than other cars. It remains to be seen what its average lifetime will be like and where all the batteries are going to go, but so far the results are at least encouraging... for the most part. :)

Re:What's the cost?

[sjames]

In this case, they compete against running a gas fired plant inefficiently to act as a regulator on the grid.

If the flywheels could store enough (or is a lot more are built), they would allow the grid to be powered entirely by (relatively) inexpensive base load power plants rather than a combination of that and more expensive to operate peak load plants.

Re:What's the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are forgetting "green subsidies". It can cost less than the energy needed to produce it.

Re:What's the cost?

[bluefoxlucid]

They have moving parts, they wear. Also, they have moving parts, they are subject to mechanical loss from air drag and bearing drag. Using maglev bearings is an excellent idea here, except that you can't just slap a magnet in the center; they're computer-controlled electromagnetic complex bearing sets.

Re:What's the cost?

[h4rr4r]

In CO2 terms Chinese coal is no more dirty than US coal. Besides the Chinese are actually building hydro and nuclear power, unlike the US.

Re:What's the cost?

[Amouth]

and what does this have to do with your argument that they produce more CO2 to produce than other equivalent tech?

also note that it is possible to do maglev on a rotating object using permanent magnets which would elevate the need for computer controlled bearing's

Re:What's the cost?

[pixelpusher220]

they would allow the grid to be powered entirely by (relatively) inexpensive base load power plants

Or be powered by intermittent renewable sources that don't require fossil fuels :)

Re:What's the cost?

[sjames]

At some point, yes. With enough such flywheels, the gusty nature of wind power would no longer be an issue. That would also be a good situation for solar, both large and small scale.

Re:What's the cost?

[pixelpusher220]

Exactly. I've read that over a large enough area, wind already provides a level of base load power, i.e. the wind is always blowing somewhere*.

*somewhere = closer than the other side of the earth since the sun is technically always shining 'somewhere' too ;-)

Not sure how this would be affected by the large distribution since some power is lost in transmission over large distances.

Re:What's the cost?

[sjames]

The long distance transmission is the problem, not only for the losses, but in having to build greater capacity. The flywheels help by reducing the use it or lose it problem that forces long distance transmission.

Re:What's the cost?

[bluefoxlucid]

they may look at the CO2 output of a particular form of power generation, and the price, and see that it is manageable and cheaper and better

Most of the people reading this thread are specifying a general assertion. Also, these are power storage units, not power generation.

Re:What's the cost?

[Amouth]

Most of the people reading this thread are specifying a general assertion. Also, these are power storage units, not power generation.

i know they are storage units not generation units.. that was one of my original points in the original post.

and you where originally comparing them to generation facilities not I.

but the one way you can compare them is that they allow you to not have to build more generation facilities that have the purpose of dealing with flux - and rather better utilize your baseline supply. when you look at them in that light i would find it hard to believe that they have near the lifetime CO2 cost as a generation (coal/gas) plant.

Flywheel, Flyschmeel: Use Prisoners

[Anonymous Coward]

sitting on their butts behind bars to PUSH wheels.

This will surely deter crime.

Yours Vladivostok,
K. Trout, C.I.O.

Re:Flywheel, Flyschmeel: Use Prisoners

[ShavedOrangutan]

Better than that, use an adaptation of the Minimum Wage Machine to replace welfare programs:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/11/minimum-wage-machine.html

Very cool, but very not new

[drinkypoo]

About a decade ago these guys had or at least were advertising a tiny version of this technology for use as a UPS. It was supposed to be cost-competitive with medium-size units. Unfortunately it turns out that there's more profit in solving the peak demand problem by absorbing base load at night and delivering it during peak demand periods. Since they use maglev bearings, [partially] evacuated chambers, and magnetic induction, the units themselves are not only very efficient but should also have excellent longevity. It looks to me like they are making the chambers out of fairly standard (if sizable) pipe components.

Flywheel at home

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always thought a flywheel at home would be a great idea. Charge it up when rates are low and use it when rates are highest so save some money on your power bill.

flywheels at a consumer level

[jzilla]

When i was in engineering school a classmate did a presentation on using flywheels at a consumer level. You buy it and put in in your house and it soaks up at offpeak times and delivers during peak times. Using flywheels at the consumer level also has the advantage of using the resource of lines during peak times, as only so much electricity can saftely travel through a line. The biggest challenge to this method is that detail of the power consumption/generation would have to be exposed to the consumer so that these device would understand when to best consume or release energy.

Re: flywheels at a consumer level

[yarnosh]

I imagine you'd just program the flywheel to follow the pricing. Just tell the flywheel when your power company charges the least and it will adapt to your usage and maximize savings. That should have the effect of using power at optimal times in terms of the grid load.

Re: flywheels at a consumer level

[vlm]

The biggest challenge to this method is that detail of the power consumption/generation would have to be exposed to the consumer so that these device would understand when to best consume or release energy.

Nah thats trivial. Noobs assume the transmission lines magically have zero resistance. They don't. All you need to do is set a fuzzy setpoint where when the wall outlet drifts above 117V it spins up and below 117V and it spins down. Put in some "fuzzy thinking fuzzy logic" so it spends about half its time in each mode, and you're golden.

The REAL problem is what to do when the kid unplugs it from the wall and sticks the cord in its mouth, what happens during a fire or flood, etc.

Re: flywheels at a consumer level

[drinkypoo]

In countries where you see net metering of power, meaning you get paid what you'd pay, lots of solutions have cropped up for storing and releasing power, and lots of alternative and small-scale generation has cropped up, too. As it turns out, when anyone can get paid fairly for the power they generate, they do so.

We've already seen the failure of coupling infrastructure to generation at the corporate level in California...

20 MW-What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that 20 MW peak output, 20 MW days, 20 MW hours, 20 MW seconds?

I'm going to hold off being impressed until I know how much energy (you know, those weird little things they call Joules) these are storing. 20 MW (or rather MVA) is still in the realm of diesel generating sets and if this is supposed to be the debut of some brand new peak-demand busting tech then in pretty underwhelmed. Grid scale storage is a pretty important issue if we are going to continue investing in fickle renewables such as PV and wind.

Re:20 MW-What?

[Muad'Dave]

Article says each flywheel can provide 1 MW for up to 15 minutes. As I asked earlier, why do they need 200 of them if they're 0.25 MW*h each? Maybe they meant 20 MW*24min.

New flywheel design

[haruchai]

Jeff Veltri of Temporal Power has a flywheel design he claims can deliver twice the power at half the cost of the Beacon designs. Ten of his prototypes will be used for smoothing wind turbine power production. But his design is based on permanent magnets so I wonder how that'll fare which the rising cost of rare earth minerals.

http://www.thestar.com/business/article/978578--hamilton-a-new-spin-on-energy-storage

Re:New flywheel design

[drinkypoo]

But his design is based on permanent magnets so I wonder how that'll fare which the rising cost of rare earth minerals.

It seems like if you are capable of controlling the entire design you can use pretty big magnets, so you can therefore use cheap ones.

Re:New flywheel design

[jgtg32a]

Rare earths are in a bubble right now, China is cutting exports of RE and cracking down on RE smuggling. That's driving the prices up, there are also other RE mines coming online in the next few years which will help keep up with the demand. I've been doing rather well in the RE market recently, even though it is volatile as hell.

Re:New flywheel design

[haruchai]

Glad to hear someone is making money in the market - not been so lucky myself in the past. I think that part of problem with the rare earth minerals is that the expertise for refining them is, to a large extent, all in China. I've heard that although some mines have already been reactivated, they export the raw material to China for processing.
I'm sure that the Chinese are likely charging a pretty penny for that service. Another issue is that the mining process can be an enviro-hazard and it's rumored that our Asian friends have been somewhat cavalier with the their mining practices - shocking, I know.

Slashdot - yesterday's articles are today's news

[Dunbal]

Just in case anyone was wondering about the age of this "news", I found an article from 2010 but I'm sure there's older. Ahh the internet, endlessly recycling news until it becomes new again.

:-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[fantomas]

haha, +1 for funny posting :-)

But a serious question for anybody who can help - we know that there's no perfect energy retaining system, there will always be losss through friction etc, what sort of loss might you expect with these fly wheels? Do they return 50%, 80%, other amount back to the grid?

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[blair1q]

I would bet that losses in the transmission system are bigger than losses in the flywheels, and the more you need the flywheels the less that is.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

The efficiency of an electric motor can be in excess of 90%. Energy is transferred to a flywheel via electric motor, and extracted (mostly likely) through the same electric motor, so your maximum theoretical efficiency is going to be your motor efficiency squared. If they tried hard, probably something like (92%)^2 or something like 85% total storage efficiency.

This is of course assuming that mechanical losses are zero, but given the design they are very likely to be close to perfect. There will also of course be some energy lost indirectly in levitation/cooling/ohmic stuff outside of the flywheel.

I think the thing about this article that bugs me the most is they say that the flywheels can store 20MW. What on earth kind of way to measure an energy storage device is that? 20MW for 0.5 seconds? 20MW for three days? Embarrassing.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[Muad'Dave]

The article says that each flywheel can "...absorb energy from the grid and discharge 1 megawatt for as much as 15 minutes." Therefore each flywheel is good for up to 0.25 MW*h, and 200 of them should be good for 50 MW*h, not 20 MW*h. I guess there are inefficiencies depending on how fast you extract power, much like batteries.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[Anonymous Coward]

A levitated spinning mass in a vacuum is a very effective energy storage medium. Losses will come from friction and other losses in the motors/generators, how these are coupled to the flywheel, and the power required to cool and drive the magnets that levitate the flywheel. Electric Motors/Generators themselves typically have efficiencies >80%.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming no other significant losses than the efficiency of motor and generator, it should just be (efficiency of motor) * (efficiency of generator). I would assume that the ballpark figures for both would be in the 90% efficiency range, so you'd be looking at a ~80% efficiency in that case.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[b0bby]

Maybe the confusion crept in because they only have 100 out of a planned 200 built so far.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[radtea]

we know that there's no perfect energy retaining system

Actually, we know you are ignorant of superconducting solenoids.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[aaarrrgggh]

This sounds like the Pentadyne design, which has about 92% efficiency. Practical discharge time is less than 3 minutes for that system.

Really seems odd to do it this way. I would think it would be cheaper to run the spinning reserve given the losses. If that won't work, do a DC intertie between locations and maintain frequency with PWM inverters.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[budgenator]

The electricity coming out of the flywheel has to be rectified and inverted to match the powerline frequency and phase, both adding losses; they have to do the same thing with wind-turbines because they also run at variable RPM's.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because maintaining such low temperatures costs zero energy...

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[mpe]

The article says that each flywheel can "...absorb energy from the grid and discharge 1 megawatt for as much as 15 minutes." Therefore each flywheel is good for up to 0.25 MW*h, and 200 of them should be good for 50 MW*h, not 20 MW*h. I guess there are inefficiencies depending on how fast you extract power, much like batteries.

The generators need to turn at both the right speed (3,000 or 3,600 rpm) and be in sync with every other generator on the grid. Wind turbines have the same issue. But the speed variation with a flywheel is likely to be less and you'd only have to disconnect the generator in case of an under speed rather than both an under and over speed.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[aXis100]

The flywheels would be spinning at hundreds of thousands of RPM, not 50/60Hz. Switching electronics would be used to establish the mains signal and keep sync.

Re::-) but a serious question, what % loss?

[evilviper]

Flywheels have very different power profiles depending on their design and usage. They can be extremely efficient, and at low speeds and high mass, they are. The longer you store energy, the more power lose is incurred due to friction (they're in a vacuum, but ride on bearings, which aren't perfect.). So, traditional (large, slow) flywheels which you quickly charge and discharge have losses basically equal to the loses of your electric motor, doubled. And in the real world, also the loses from AC-DC-AC conversion. You really can get 85% efficiency in the idealized cases, but in more realistic energy storage situations, loses can be massive, think 20% efficiency. Still, batteries are pretty poor at energy storage to, so high efficiency in the best case, and long service life, make it worthwhile.

For the high speed, portable flywheels, things are not so good. Traditional bearings can't be used, and electromagnetic bearings have never worked very well... They sound perfect, but those magnetic edies just annihilate all the benefits over time, and decades of r&d hasn't shown anything promising. Sorry to be a buzz kill, but these really don't work, and efficiency hasn't rivaled batteries, and won't until somebody finds the magic formula for magnetic bearings.

Popular Mechanics

[Kamiza Ikioi]

I remember reading about these over the past decades. The number 1 thing stopping them (besides cost) was safety. Apparently, they've figured out the right materials to prevent micro-fractures from building up and exploding these things like small nuclear bombs. I wonder if they are safe enough for home use, yet. Anyone have a link to a safety analysis and the rate at which they need replaced versus the time between fractures?

Re:Popular Mechanics

[blair1q]

like small nuclear bombs

25 kWh = 0.000021511 kT = 0.021511 T = 43 lbs of dynamite.

Not insignificant on a human scale, but pretty lame as nukes, or even conventional air-dropped bombs, go.

If it could release all the energy at once, in all directions, it'd probably make a mess of your house, if it were just sitting exposed in the living room. But, since the rotating part is well under ground level, the casing is evacuated, and the flywheel is made of the sort of impact-dissipating stuff car makers use to meet crash-safety requirements, it's going to be pretty lame as 43 lbs of dynamite goes, too.

I call this system less dangerous than a leaky gas pipe.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[aug24]

And don't forget, a laptop battery contains approximately the same energy as a hand grenade, and we let all sorts of idiots manufacture, replace, and carry those wherever they like.

Flywheels

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a company manufacturing these sort of devices maybe 10 or 15 years ago. The advantage to a flywheel battery is that you can charge or discharge it at a high rate, and they last 20 years or more with little maintenance, versus about 5 years for most chemical batteries. The disadvantage is that they lose about 1% of their energy per hour, if not supplied with power to top it off, even with maglev bearings and in a vacuum. Still it seems like a good idea to even out solar/wind, and ease the use of natural gas plants. Peak load power is expensive power.

Re:Flywheels

[TheLink]

The disadvantage is that they lose about 1% of their energy per hour, if not supplied with power to top it off,

Is that really bad? How much power do UPSes waste when not on battery?

taking stock

[itwbennett]

Hoping the attention of the slashdot community will do good things for the Beacon stock I bought.

Power should cost more during day time.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

At present only industrial customers pay different rates for their electricity based on the time of day. Domestic electricity prices are constant all day. There is no incentive for anyone to defer their power consumption to off-peak hours, or to invest in any technology to smoothen out their power consumption curve. If we pay one price for the day time electricity and get a deep discount for the night time electricity, these fly wheel storage devices can be used to soak up energy at night and use it during the day. Since most of the day time power consumption is air conditioning, we could simply make ice/chill water at night and use it to cool the home during the day.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[h4rr4r]

Domestic electricity prices are constant all day.

Maybe where you live, but not where I live. I bet if you requested the time based pricing you could get it. When I was growing up we only did laundry and dishes after 8pm. Cut the electric bill by a huge amount.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Arlet]

I don't know where you live, but we've had double meters (night and day) for as long as I can remember.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a time of use plan where my off-peak rate is roughly 5x lower than on-peak. We consciously shift as much usage as we can to the off-peak hours and it helps us avoid a few hundred $ per year for our electricity.

I'm not an industrial customer.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Andy Dodd]

Wrong - many areas charge residents more during peak periods. California is especially known for this, and it's one of the reasons (lots of sun being the other) why residential solar power is fairly popular there. Peak solar generation times happen to coincide with peak electricity cost times.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[vikisonline]

Same in ontario. http://www.ontario-hydro.com/index.php?page=current_rates I run the AC at night to really cold temperatures, and then keep it off during the day :P

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[samkass]

Heck, why artificially set prices at all? Someday everyone will be recharging their electric cars at night and companies will beg us to use electricity during the day instead.

Now that meters are getting high-tech enough, we should just have a spot market for power and buy/sell into that market any time of the day or night.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the midwest and I've never seen anything like varying electricity rates in the 6 or so states around me with large summer power drains for AC. Although I don't doubt it's coming with the widening implementation of smart meters.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't be cost effective for a residential customer. Also residential rates are priced to keep this stuff out of the market. Finally most residential consumers don't care, they just want the lights on and A/C running. That's why there's few houses with solar panels.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Eil]

At present only industrial customers pay different rates for their electricity based on the time of day.

Because a single industrial company can easily consume much more energy than all of the densely-populated neighborhoods within a 1-mile radius.

Domestic electricity prices are constant all day.

This isn't necessarily the case anymore. At least, not everywhere. In places where smart meters are being deployed, you can be charged more during peak usage and less during off-peak. Although to me, the idea of charging more for energy during peak usage is just as greedy as setting an arbitrary bandwidth cap and charging for going over it.

There is no incentive for anyone to defer their power consumption to off-peak hours, or to invest in any technology to smoothen out their power consumption curve.

To the majority of us, "off-peak" means those times which we are either at work or asleep. Do you propose people wake up at 3 a.m. to wash their clothes? Run home during lunch to take a shower?

If we pay one price for the day time electricity and get a deep discount for the night time electricity, these fly wheel storage devices can be used to soak up energy at night and use it during the day.

Are you talking about putting the flywheels on the consumer side or the utility side? They really don't make sense on the consumer side. They're already being used in utilities, datacenters, and industry as an energy buffer between "power out" and "diesel generators running".

Since most of the day time power consumption is air conditioning, we could simply make ice/chill water at night and use it to cool the home during the day.

Now you're talking crazy. Doing that would use more energy on average because you would be running a compressor constantly for a long period of time to cool down a large quantity of water. An AC unit, by comparison only runs intermittently and doesn't need to run as hard because it's only cooling the air 10-25 degrees (Fahrenheit) below ambient temperature rather than 50-70 degrees.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in Southeastern WI and we have time of use plans with We Energies. Too bad it seems uncommon in some areas.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[j-beda]

A number of places (some or most of California perhaps? and Ontario as well) do have time-of-day pricing for residential customers.

from 2009:
http://www.davis.ca/en/blog/Climate-Change-Law-Practice-Group/2009/05/14/Ontario-launches-time-of-day-electricity-pricing-initiative

http://local.smart-homeowner.com/Time_of_Use_Pricing_for_Electricity_San_Diego_CA-r1196840-San_Diego_CA.html

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Since most of the day time power consumption is air conditioning, we could simply make ice/chill water at night and use it to cool the home during the day.

Now you're talking crazy. Doing that would use more energy on average because you would be running a compressor constantly for a long period of time to cool down a large quantity of water. An AC unit, by comparison only runs intermittently and doesn't need to run as hard because it's only cooling the air 10-25 degrees (Fahrenheit) below ambient temperature rather than 50-70 degrees.

Wonderful theory buddy. Pity, these fools did not listen to you: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/25352/

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[RLaager]

To the majority of us, "off-peak" means those times which we are either at work or asleep. Do you propose people wake up at 3 a.m. to wash their clothes? Run home during lunch to take a shower?

My dishwasher has a timer delay feature. I use it already even though I don't have time-of-use billing because I can shift the noise to a time when I'm not near it.

If my washer had a timer, I could wash one load of clothes during the day and/or one during the night, depending on when the off-peak hours were. Likewise for drying. A given load could take up to two days to get washed and dried, but that's not a huge problem. In fact, I already prefer doing one (full) load at a time more often than batching it up and doing laundry all day.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I live there are different tiers to choose from depending on your lifestyle and use patterns.
There's also bill balancing, which spreads your predicted bill out evenly month to month.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[evilviper]

only industrial customers pay different rates for their electricity based on the time of day.

Sounds fine to me, since they make up 75% of electrical demand.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[sjames]

That's something smart meters are supposed to facilitate. The old electro-mechanical residential meters weren't up to the job.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Keyboarder]

I'd heard of a plant in France that would spend most of the night pumping water up a hill, then during peak hours they'd have that water run right back down the hill over some turbines. Relatively low tech solution to a technical problem eh?

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a big world: chances are your statement is wrong for quite a large percentage of it. I get charged onpeak and offpeak rates.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[ResidentSourcerer]

In Alberta, peak power use is the supper hour, followed by the shit, shower and shave time block in the morning. Late at night is the low point.

I recently dropped my power bill by $30 bucks a month by having the 50 Amp pole breaker replaced with a 35 A. one.

I've yet to trip it. I figure it will trip if I have the oven on, and start the table saw the same moment that the well pump kicks

A unit that could average power consumption would be a big deal to the utilities. Would mean far smaller wires needed for the distribution network. Consider: A standard service right now is 100 to 200 A. Which means 4 guage wire to the house. It has to be sized to handle the possibility of 20 KW. Most people, however use under 1000 kwhr/month, which is is on the order of 1 kW continuous. So having a box that:

A: Could hold roughly 1 day's power.
B: Could be charged at a rate roughly 1.5 to 2 times the average consumption rate of the customer.
C: Could be programmed by the utility company as to when to charge

would be a big win.

As a side effect, consider that in a power outage, everyone has a day's power at normal consumption, and with some frugality perhaps as much as a weeks.

Re:Power should cost more during day time.

[afidel]

We tried that, we got Enron and rolling blackouts across California.

15 mega watts of energy storage

[Script Cat]

Seriously why use stupid units in these stories. The system provides 15 mega watts for 15 minuits. Thats 3.75 Mw-h. according to the wikipedia an average person uses 11,400 W (average not peak).
So this can power 40 people for 8 hours.
Now you'll have to excuse me I have a meeting in 2.8 hogsheads. After that I have to goto the store and buy a meter of milk. And my furnace is a 15000BTU model and it's used them all up.

Re:15 mega watts of energy storage

[hackertourist]

Sure, not mentioning its storage capacity is an omission, but quoting the maximum power output is hardly irrelevant or stupid.

Re:15 mega watts of energy storage

[Arlet]

That average energy consumption isn't just electricity. Average electricity per person is just 1460 W for the US, which is what this system is for.

Re:15 mega watts of energy storage

[blair1q]

You've got a 3-gill head in a 10-bludger hat.

This thing isn't meant to supplant the entire supply in case of a blackout. It's meant to give the grid a few MW for a few minutes to prevent a brownout that could cause a blackout.

And it's probably not meant for a major portion of the grid, just a locale with an incipient supply problem.

Re:15 mega watts of energy storage

[PieSquared]

Because it's being used as a temporary generator, not a battery.

Re:15 mega watts of energy storage

[director_mr]

You obviously don't understand what this station is used for. It is meant to provide a brief buffer in the event of a power interruption or changeover. Previously this was done by powering up a natural gas generator which is a huge waste of energy because you provide excess (unneeded) power for a while. These units can be used on demand, and don't use a lot of energy when they are on stand by. Think of them as a UPS for the electrical company.

Liebert tried this.

[bipedalhominid]

Liebert made one of these for server room UPSs. We never got one although the salesman tried to get us to buy it. The thought of that wheel sitting in the next room and spinning that fast spooked me. I am not religious but there is no need to constantly tempt fate by working next to that kind of energy day in and day out. I guess it is a good way to store energy but I really dont want one in my backyard, basement or server room. Let's see the explanation for that disaster. Well, we made it through the hurricane and the earthquakes and, nope, the fire did not take us out. However, when that damn flywheel got out of balance due to cheap magnets in the bearings.... Damn thing took out half the rack before going through the roof and into the cafeteria. Just saying, I like fire but I dont carry an incendiary grenade in my back pocket.

Re:Liebert tried this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why the flywheels are made out of a material that won't stand up to the containment walls. If one of the flywheels came loose it would pulverize itself on its containment wall and wouldn't breach the vessel.

Re:Liebert tried this.

[afidel]

Yeah, because a battery room has never blown out a wall at a datacenter, oh wait....

Re:Liebert tried this.

[bipedalhominid]

Really? Cool. When and where? I would like to know more.

So, in monetary terms...

[alispguru]

... the system can buffer $500 worth of power (5 MWh = 5000 KWh, $0.10/KWh wholesale).

And it cost $40 million to build (at least that's the size of the loan)? That's 40,000 times the value of the energy it can hold.

If the buffering keeps an expensive peaking source off-line, it might pay for itself in a few years of continuous use.

Re:So, in monetary terms...

[johanatan]

It might pay for itself in a few years of continuous use

I think you're missing a factor of two somewhere. Wouldn't you want the buffer to average out to half-full over the long run? What good is a constantly filled buffer?

Re:So, in monetary terms...

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind the use case here: meeting "random" surges in demand. Surge demand power can cost utilities 2.5x more than base level demand because they have to have idle generators on stand-by. Alternatively, it could be replacing banks of LiON batteries or supercapacitors to help keep the AC voltage and current in phase (bad things happen when the voltage and current are out of phase). Both options are a lot more expensive than wholesale electricity prices.

I think they payback in raw electricity terms will be a lo more than just it's capacity. Of course, no idea what the maintenance on these things are, or the management overhead, etc.

Re:So, in monetary terms...

[cnettel]

It might pay for itself in a few years of continuous use

I think you're missing a factor of two somewhere. Wouldn't you want the buffer to average out to half-full over the long run? What good is a constantly filled buffer?

The energy grid, at this point, has a lot of possible sources for sudden rises in demand (time-bound peaks, but also suddenly failing production facilities), but very few sudden rises in supply. From that perspective, it makes all sense to target full charge with the exception of the minutes when it's actually used.

Re:So, in monetary terms...

[DriedClexler]

Kernel hacks?

Re:So, in monetary terms...

[fireylord]

Until there's lots more wind farms, which are at best sporadic, and at worst pointless

Re:So, in monetary terms...

[Anonymous Coward]

A key thing balancing units do (which is what these flywheel things are to be used for), are to keep power frequency in check. They need to throttle up and down very quickly to do so. Power companies can get penalised a lot of money and can do a lot of damage when frequency moves away from 50 or 60 hertz (depending where you are in the world).
This is the reason why wind farms are a pain in the butt, gusts of wind screw up power frequency, need to balance it.

Re:So, in monetary terms...

[Chris Gunn]

It might pay for itself in a few years of continuous use

I think you're missing a factor of two somewhere. Wouldn't you want the buffer to average out to half-full over the long run? What good is a constantly filled buffer?

Well, we would have to guess how many discharge cycles per day. To pay itself of in 10 years you would need 11 per day (=40000/10/365).

Science Fiction once again predicts real life

[Anonymous Coward]

A plug for one of my favorite SF authors:
http://cheeseburgerbrown.com/stories/The_Bikes_of_New_York.html

I really am old...

[dcigary]

When I first read the write-up I was thinking it was a huge farm of wind-up clock-like devices that when needed could be "started" and the potential energy in their huge spring coils powered a generator. When depleted, they were wound back up by power from the grid.

(sigh)

I guess I really am old...

Re:I really am old...

[nschubach]

That's alright, I pictured giant wheels like the shield generators on Hoth:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Theater_shield

Datacenters too...

[xded]

Flywheels are also common in datacenters, where they fill the gap between the limited run-time of battery powered UPSs and the long start time of diesel generators.

Yeah

[Quiet_Desperation]

you can always get a racetrack-ready Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid, which has a single energy-storage flywheel that can give you a 160 HP burst of power when you need a little extra oomph.

Pictured: Oomph

NaS batteries beat flywheels hands down.

[goodmanj]

Beacon Power flywheel:
      1 meter wide x 2 meters high
      25 kilowatt-hours energy storage

NGK Sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery:
      1 meter wide x 2 meters high
      375 kilowatt-hours energy storage

The sodium-sulfur battery stores 15 times the energy. Nobody will quote a price for either on the Internet, but since they're devices of similar size and complexity, their costs are probably similar.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.test.bpa.gov%2Fenergy%2Fn%2F%2Ftech%2Fenergyweb%2Fdocs%2FEnergy%2520Storage%2FNGK-Paper.PDF&rct=j&q=ngk%20nas%20kwh%20specifications&ei=CnzmTZCLJ4nVgAe-xv2hCw&usg=AFQjCNHUPF1Q-55yAVfzjDOxGWY_gUuCaQ

Re:NaS batteries beat flywheels hands down.

[ableal]

The flywheel unit seems to hold 250 kW.h (TFA: "1 megawatt for as much as 15 minutes")

Re:NaS batteries beat flywheels hands down.

[goodmanj]

No, TFA is confusing statistics of individual flywheels with clusters of them. The individual 25 kwh flywheels are grouped into modular clusters of 10: each of these 10-unit modules delivers 250 kwh (1 MW for 15 mins), and is the size of a couple of cargo containers. See this white paper from the manufacturer.

Re:NaS batteries beat flywheels hands down.

[ableal]

Thanks, that clears it up. The not-so-subtle aroma of boondoggle gets stronger ...

Grid Flow Batteries

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a startup that is about to deploy large capacity flow batteries for a similar use in the power grid. I've always heard that a major disadvantage of flywheels is cost/ROI for the utility. Have they overcome that?

Re:Grid Flow Batteries

[Big_Breaker]

Flywheels have high power density by volume, weight and cost. Good for filling deep, short power gaps. Batteries have better energy density by volume, weight and cost. think of a flywheel as somewhere in between a battery and a capacitor.

Re:New tech? HULK Rollercoaster at Universal uses

[Anonymous Coward]

2 of these to launch the ride. It lowers their peak power usage which the utilities use to set the rates.

"I'd think a battery would be a lot simpler"

[Jeffrey_Walsh VA]

You would, but some data centers and other facilities are replacing batteries with flywheels. They yield better performance and long-term reliability to start diesel motors, bridge demand before generators are online and regulate voltage through brownout and flicker: http://www.vyconenergy.com/pages/flywheeltech.htm

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

He just doesn't understand Slashdot. Get out of here, you stupid critic!

not a new idea

[scharkalvin]

Flywheel backup power isn't a new idea, but this is taking it to the next level.
I worked for a company that had a flywheel backup power generator. It was basically a several horse power motor connected to a generator with a big flywheel weight in the middle going along for the ride. In the event of a SHORT brownout from the local power company it kept the lab computers up for the 30 seconds or so that a typical brownout would last. In the event that a longer power failure happened, a diesel backup generator could come on line in under 30 seconds.

Flywheels. Scientific American,. Dec 1973

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly is this novel? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

TFA Disagrees!

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

No one uses batteries on this scale. They compete with hydroelectric storage, where water is pumped up a hill to fill a lake.

Read TFA! It specifically says that the new flywheel units directly compete with large shipping container sized Lithium Ion batteries in this application.

Works Well

[Anonymous Coward]

We use this to power our solar lights out front of our office.

Nothing to do with peak

[Anonymous Coward]

Regulation - which is what theses flywheels are being used for - doesn't have anything to do with peak demand. It also doesn't replace gas turbines. Generators are dispatched to meet what the load is predicted to be in the future. Regulating units are dispatched every few seconds to make up for the difference between how much load there actually is vs. how much was forecast minutes ago and how much power generators are actually putting out vs. how much they're being asked to put out.

Hydro, fossil fueled steam turbine generators, and combined cycle units can provide regulation. Gas turbines and nuclear units usually cannot.

(Slides 8 and 9 at http://pjm.com/training/~/media/training/core-curriculum/ip-gen-301/gen-301-ancillary-services.ashx are the best I can find)

aha

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that im a rabid antinuclear headinsand/NIMBY type, but not breaching the containment vessel is what they told us about Fukushima.

Engineering not being up to the job when tested in RL happens, you know.

Flywheels?

[fyngyrz]

Did anyone think to ask the flies if they wanted to drive these wheels? Well, did they? Of course not. Down with flywheels!

Variety?

[LoudMusic]

I wonder if using a variety of masses would be beneficial in having quicker response times for varying current fluctuations.

Also, I've wondered about using flywheels in freight trains. It would seem a car or two with massive flywheels could be used on downhills to store energy while braking and uphills to add in a little kick. There would likely have paired flywheels to counter each other's rotation and keep from flipping the car off the track. But just doing some really basic math, if you were to add a single 80 ton 'flywheel car' to a train of 100 cars you'd only be adding 1% load. All you'd need to gain is >1% fuel saving for it to be beneficial, and 80 tons of flywheel could surely do that. Surely?

Re:Variety?

[drinkypoo]

Batteries of micro-flywheels (well, micro- compared to these babies) would probably make more sense on a train where you're going to have to do something about vibration. I think that you might as well just use hydraulics on a train, though, it's easier to solve the problem for them at this stage.

That's not the case everywhere

[dbIII]

In some places consumers get a significant discount for running hot water systems or swimming pool pumps off peak. It can reduce the peak by quite a lot.

Coriolis Not Just Small: Irrelevant

[Roger W Moore]

The Coriolis effect is far too small to have any significant impact on flywheels this small...

While that is certainly true the coriolis force only applies to objects moving between different latitudes and is caused by the different tangential velocities of the surface at different latitutdes. Hence there is no coriolis force for the flywheel in question since the centre of mass is stationary and remains at a fixed latitude.

pulsars are nature's flywheels

[Scott Ransom]

All of the energy that we see (as well as the energy we don't see, which is the vast majority of it and which comes out in a relativistic particle wind) comes from the rotation of the neutron star. That means that pulsars are flywheels. And amazingly (even to me, and I study them daily), the most energetic pulsars give off tens of thousands of times more power than the total power output of the Sun. And all from rotation. That's crazy.

Damn the Universe is cool.

jordan shoes

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my physics teachers at school used to work in a power station for a bit. He showed us some pictures of a 'fuse' that they used. When I think of a fuse, I think of a small, thin, piece of wire. This was a large copper bar. He also had some pictures from when it blew - the entire bar was vaporised. When people talk about MWs and GWs, the numbers don't seem real. When you see lumps of copper being instantly turned to gas, you get a real feeling for the amount of power involved.http://www.jordanshoeshotsale.com

Beacon flywheels act as a grid buffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Beacon flywheel = temporary buffering...

The beacon flywheels are intended for frequency regulation, not energy arbitrage.

flywheel energy storage

[Politimemes]

this is third hand, but...

In the UK they built a synchrotron, and when they turned it on all the lights dimmed in the surrounding area on every cycle. They installed a bunch of flywheels coupled to motor/generators. These were *big* flywheels, maybe 1 ton each.

The story is that one came off its bearings one day and went throught three buildings before it stopped,
      Tony

What goes 'round comes 'round

[iliketrash]

When I was a senior EE student at Kansas State University in 1977 I participated in an alternative energy project. We realized then, even as students, that flywheels can have a very high energy density, can be local to the power plant or distributed across an area, are very efficient, are somewhat low-tech, etc. Recently I was at an informal gathering of high-level engineers and managers from a regional electric utility who happened to mention the problem with smoothing the supply curve associated with solar-thermal arrays (in Arizona). I mentioned flywheels and they all looked at me like I was an idiot.