Clean Power Concept: Flywheel Power Quality and Energy Storage
The Challenge
Power quality is the frequency and severity of disturbances from the standard AC sinusoidal waveform on the incoming power supplied to electrical equipment. These deviations may adversely affect safe or reliable operation of sensitive equipment, such as computers and industrial controllers. Often the loss of productivity and process scrap resulting from poor electrical quality and/or equipment failure far exceeds the direct damages of system downtime and equipment failure costs.
How Flywheel Energy Storage Works
Kinetic Traction Systems (KTSi) experience in power electronics, power quality, and distributed energy storage allows deployment of GTR Flywheel Energy Storage Systems in a variety of UPS and power quality applications.
The flywheels can be configured to provide frequency regulation, voltage stability, demand management (peak shaving), and energy storage in stand-alone or hybrid battery systems.
KTSi flywheels are well suited to provide high current output and are able to provide fast response, inrush current for inductive loads, such as motor startup, compressor loads, or medical imaging equipment.
The flywheel energy storage can provide fast response backup power ride-through time to start a diesel generator or transfer to another power source. The flywheels can also be configured in series with batteries to significantly increase battery life by absorbing the
high frequency, low duration power interruptions, which minimizes battery discharge/charge cycles. KTSi supplies UPS systems with integrated grid inverters or stand-alone flywheel energy storage.
Long Life
One of the key characteristics of the KTSi flywheel system is long useable life of over 10 million charge-discharge
cycles. This equates to approximately one charge-discharge cycle every minute for over 20 years. This makes the lifecycle cost particularly attractive when compared to other forms of energy storage, such as ultra-capacitors (about one million cycles) and batteries (about one hundred thousand cycles). Flywheels can also extend the discharge time and useful life of batteries if combined together in a “hybrid” energy system.
Increased Capacity, Improved Reliability
Optimizing power quality is a key enabler increasing stability and improving the reliability on electrical distribution systems that support critical loads, such as medical equipment, continuous process production, or a variety of mission critical, sensitive electronic equipment. KTSi flywheels provide a filter and buffer between the power generation and distribution source, and the protected load electrical demand. Flywheels increase the control of the electricity frequency, thereby increasing the stability and reliability of the supply.
KTSi flywheels use the inertia of a high-speed carbon fiber rotor to provide fast response, short duration ride-through in the event of power loss. The flywheel also acts as a filter against power spikes and sags because these short duration power events have little effect on the rotational speed of the high-speed flywheel.
Flywheels spin continuously under normal operating conditions with an accurate state of charge always available. Flywheels are often placed in series with batteries to provide front-end high frequency “glitch protection” preventing excessive discharge-charge battery cycles and extending the ride-through time to 15 minutes or more.
Benefits of a Compact “Electro-Mechanical Battery”
Flywheel energy storage is ideally suited to power quality UPS applications because of its very fast response to both voltage and frequency fluctuations. KTSi flywheels have high power density when compared to batteries allowing the flywheels to capture and store energy very quickly without negative effects on performance. The KTSi flywheel is relatively small, scalable, modular, and can be configured in a variety of indoor installations.