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Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

theguardian.com

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Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#81

Post by joatmon-snoo »

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #4

> This is the first time a project of this kind will be used anywhere in the world and ESO believes it could be a “huge step forward” in running a zero-carbon electricity grid. I'm trying to find some stats on this, because flywheel UPS aren't a new idea: https://www.finning.com/en_IE/products/new/power-systems/ele... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system#...

Here's what I was able to dig up, hopefully someone will be able to take this and run with it:

* nothing obvious at https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news * minutes from a 2011 meeting suggest that ESO was talking to Beacon Power at the time: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/sites/eso/files/documents/18... * http://credenceturbine.com/business/flywheel-energy-storage-... mentions Beacon Power providing a frequency regulation flywheel in 2014 for a 20 MW plant * "Techno-Economic Assessment of Energy Storage Technologies for Inertia Response and Frequency Support from Wind Farms" 2020 July 02, https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/13/3421/pdf discusses some details

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#82

Post by dredmorbius »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #18

Those things have interesting failure modes. Will they have to be buried underground, or is this somehow a solved problem?

Underground armoured vaults and massive cap units help minimise energy containment failure risk.

Illustrated here in a 1 MW Beacon power system:

https://invidio.us/watch?v=eCtlfj4kMJs

Not all vendor systems incorporate these features, e.g.:

https://invidio.us/watch?v=767y5ViGurA

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#84

Post by dredmorbius »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #32

Why do we care about keeping frequency stable when more and more products simply put the power through a rectifier to turn it to DC? The lamps all have LED "bulbs". The computers have power bricks. Do we really care if the compressors in the air conditioners and the refrigerators turn at a slightly different rate? Okay, maybe a rapid shift in frequency could be damaging, but a slight drift sounds okay mechanically. O…

Inputting energy to the grid must occur at grid frequency. You want that stable. And there are still applications which themselves rely on grid frequency for timming and synch. Change or vary freq and you'll violate lots of assumptions.

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#85

Post by ricardobeat »

cordite wrote: post #77

How big and how fast must a flywheel be to perturb Earth's rotation, in a similar method of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope

The rotational energy of the planet is absolutely massive. I don't remember the numbers but you'd need millions of atomic bombs fired at once just to make a dent - and it would still not affect the orbit of this now radioactive fireball at all.

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#86

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jimnotgym wrote: post #66
DrBazza wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just cynically generalising - the rest of world compared to the UK has typically less stringent planning requirements, and more mountainous terrain. To store energy in other countries (except perhaps Holland..!) you build a hydro dam, and pump water into those dammed lakes using excess electricity to store it up for later release. We have mountains (Wales, Lake District, Scotland), but the likelihood of creating…

There are two pumped storage stations in Wales that I know of. Dinorwig (where the power station is inside the mountain, as a student I got to go in there) and Ffestiniog. Wales has a long history of having dams built to provide water to English cities, see the Elan Valley, Llyn Vyrnwy, Llyn Clewedog and many more. The displacement of people and 'theft' of water even spurned a terrorist organisation to stop it called…

>Wales has a long history ...//

Or to put it another way, Britain has a long history of building water capacity for British cities.

Scandalous! /s

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#87

Post by deleuze »

DrBazza wrote: post #8

This is a consequence of the UK having little capacity for pumped-storage, i.e. hydro-electric. We don't really have the height, and we have "areas of outstanding natural beauty" that cannot be built in easily, so we need alternatives to store the energy. The rest of the world just builds a dam, creates a new lake, and moves on.

lmao, only on hn would someone scare quote areas of outstanding natural beauty.

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#88

Post by URSpider94 »

phtevus wrote: post #73
ladberg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding how this flywheel operates. It doesn't provide 50hz AC in the same way the grid operates, it just is attached to a DC motor that provides electricity which can then be converted into AC to power the grid. That means it can spin at any frequency and it doesn't really matter what state the grid is in.

The article states the flywheel will not be used to provide electricity to the grid.

Of course it provides electricity to the grid. It doesn't provide any NET energy to the grid, since it's not a generator. It will pull and push energy to the grid in small amounts as needed to regulate the frequency, which is directly related to the voltage of the grid.

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#89

Post by lolc »

yboris wrote: post #60

Feels like friction would eat away a lot of electricity, no?

Flywheels (no matter their size) can be operated in near vacuum with magnetic bearings[0]. Friction can be really low. A funny aside is that they have to be aligned with earth's rotation so they don't resist it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_bearing

Re: Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts

#90

Post by CoffeeDregs »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #18

Those things have interesting failure modes. Will they have to be buried underground, or is this somehow a solved problem?

Agreed. I did a napkin-back calculation on a giant (50m diameter) grid-scale flywheel back in grad school in '95 (when there was talk of powering cars with them) and failures would have been catastrophic since the flywheel would dissipate all of the energy nearly immediately (in comparison to gasoline). A car powered by a flywheel (0.5m diameter) would have been a guided missile... Fortunately, grid-scale flywheels can be placed in out-of-the-way locations.
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