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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.
actually probably only until the heat death of the universe.
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
Buy low (spin up the wheels), sell high (discharge the wheel energy)
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
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...
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.
"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)
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.
20 megawatts peak output? But how many megawatt hours?
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?
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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?
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?
That is why you use the maglevs, so you don't contribute to the heat death.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
In much the same way that putting a one-pound weight in your car reduces its fuel economy.
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.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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?
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.
Since they start from a stop and will eventually end up stopped, the net effect on the rotation of the earth will be zero.
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Hoping the attention of the slashdot community will do good things for the Beacon stock I bought.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Although having just said all of that, I guess the answer is they are actually very similar in principle yes ;)
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.
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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.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.... ?
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.
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.
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.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
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
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
... 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.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
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.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The Coriolis effect doesn't affect the energy stored in a closed system, right?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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...
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.
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
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.
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
Supercaps would seem a much better solution than either batteries or flywheels for that kind of short charge/discharge cycle.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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
And the warranty is only for 10^35 years.
Typical.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you're drawing that much of a vacuum, then you'd have a good insulator for your superconducting magnet
antipaucity
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.
Protons are the opposite of electrons, so the less of them the better.
At least neutrons just get in the way.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
According to wikipedia, gyroscopes are not effect by the coriolos forces
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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.
The concept of entropy is lost on you.
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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.
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As long as they are running, they'll make the day either longer or shorter.
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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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Did anyone think to ask the flies if they wanted to drive these wheels? Well, did they? Of course not. Down with flywheels!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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: 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
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
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?
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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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
If the duration of storage is all that's important you could use a rock and a mountain.
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.
Learn to love Alaska
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?
Stick Men
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.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!