Conversation

Thursday night thoughts: what if wind and solar farms used excess production to power spinning reserve flywheels and sold that as a a separate frequency regulation service? It’s literally spinning reserve. Probably cheaper and easier than batteries...
11
7
We have to note that the only real economic case for grid scale batteries to date has been in the Australian NEM for frequency response. It’s not in volumetric electricity sales
1
2
I guess it would depend on how much energy a flywheel stores vs a battery. I imagine batteries can store more, but flywheels have nice inertia and are probably less failure prone...
1
1
So yeah. One of the main integration problems with renewables are the effects on frequency. Use a flywheel and those problems go away. We don’t need to wait for battery technology to be good enough
1
1