Flywheels help New York power grid

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Flywheels help New York power grid

Postby FirstClassSkeptic » 12 Jul 2011 22:42

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Last Updated: 2:25 PM, July 12, 2011

Posted: 2:06 PM, July 12, 2011




ALBANY, N.Y.— Some excess power on New York's electrical grid is being stored short-term in 200 flywheel batteries that can zap the power back into the system within seconds when needed.

The $69 million battery farm near the Massachusetts border in Stephentown, N.Y., was officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday and addresses the problem of how to smooth out the ever-fluctuating balance between electricity supply and demand in power grids. Typically, power plants either ramp up or slow down production as needed.

Beacon Power of Tyngsborough, Mass., says its flywheel plant, which can store 20 megawatts, can balance the load about 100 times faster than typical power plants. The flywheel batteries provide a cleaner and more efficient buffer in a time when more intermittent power sources like wind and solar come are coming online, said Beacon president and chief executive officer Bill Capp.


"You need more of those balancing service to keep everything working," Capp said. "We're coming in at a perfect time, just when that need is being identified."

Beacon's flywheel batteries contain a rotor levitated magnetically in a seven-foot sealed chamber, where they spin up to 16,000 times per minute. The flywheels store power as motion — think of the way potters' wheels are hard to stop once they're up to speed. The rotors spin in a vacuum so there's less resistance.

"The whole rotor is levitated magnetically and there's just not much to go wrong," Capp said.

More traditional lithium ion batteries have been used for this kind of "frequency regulation," and there have been smaller flywheel demonstration projects, but this appears to the first large-scale flywheel regulation system hooked up to a power grid, said Haresh Kamath, program manager for energy storage at the industry-supported Electric Power Research Institute.

Kamath said that while flywheels cannot store a lot of energy, they are attractive because they can cycle up and down over and over again without degrading.

Beacon said its plants are designed to last 20 years or more.

The company plans to break ground soon on a second flywheel project in Hazle Township, Pa.


http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/flyw ... a5B78AikaM


This article states two things I thought important: 1) There's excess power at times. 2) The load on the power grind fluctuates, and adjustments must be made.

They sort of make out like this wasn't really needed until solar and wind power started to be used. Solar and wind are intermittent energy sources, which they admit, for obviousness, and that makes the problem worse, but the problems of fluctuating load has always been there.
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Re: Flywheels help New York power grid

Postby rerevisionist » 13 Jul 2011 11:18

Thanks for that. Interesting that they call them 'batteries' when it's just a flywheel, though admittedly the usage is traditional, as in battery of guns etc. If 200 wheels store 20 Mwatts, that's about .1 MW each, which seems about right for a 2 metre heavy wheel. (Look up moment of inertia and angular velocity!) It does suggest dumploads were cheaper, and this is a reaction to increased cost of electricity. I wonder how the incoming energy speeds the wheel up, and how the rotation is converted back into electricity when it's wanted - I'd guess there's a separate device to convert its direct current into 50 cycle mains for the US grids.

By the way I don't you if you know this, but there's a lake in Britain (Wales to be more precise) which is used as a storage device - surplus electricity is used to pump water uphill into a lake, and hydroelectricity is used to generate it back. Maybe there are many such devices which junk journalists are too thick to know about.
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Re: Flywheels help New York power grid

Postby FirstClassSkeptic » 13 Jul 2011 15:52

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Count ... ge_Station

I know about this one. I own some electrical tools used on this project, that were sold at auction after the project was finished.
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