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...
Conversation
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
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about
1
4
It looks like flywheels can be made to store 2MW and lose only 5% through of friction per day. That seems like...pretty great?!
2
2
Replying to
See above comment - pumped hydro is the Optimus Prime of storage but not possible to build in most places
1

