By Jo Nova
Thanks to Paul Homewood at NotAlotofPeopleKnowThat for finding this gem of a video.
Commiserations to friends in the UK, where Ed Miliband, or worse, his new National Electricity System Operator (NESO) think that flywheels will save money because the UK won’t need to maintain back up power stations and import so much electricity.
Ed Miliband is the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is a bit like being the Minister for War and Peace at the same time, or perhaps more like Health and Ebola. His big new plan is to set up a big new bureaucracy (NESO) and their big idea is to stop blackouts by installing giant flywheels around the country.
Flywheels are good at smoothing out the frequency glitches, but the second largest flywheel operation in the world would only power the UK for a fraction of a second. It’s going to take a lot of flywheels, or as David Evans dryly remarked, if they can speed up the flywheels it might work, but to put enough energy in, they may need to get close to the speed of light.
Ed Miliband reveals plan to prevent net zero blackouts
by Johnathon Leake, The Telegraph
Giant flywheels are to be installed around the UK to minimise the risk of blackouts as the power system goes carbon-free.
Flywheels are energy storage systems that use surplus electricity to accelerate a massive metal “wheel”…
NESO said the schemes would save consumers money by cutting the need for maintaining backup power stations and importing power from overseas via interconnectors.
A spokesman said: “The pathfinders alone are expected to provide consumers with savings of £14.9bn between 2025 and 2035.”
As Paul Burgess explains, the flywheel sales team often talk in megawatts but rarely mention megawatt-hours (probably because they are embarrassed). The worlds second largest flywheel system has 200 carbon fibre flywheels spinning in a vacuum chamber and provides 20 megawatts. But it can only supply 1 megawatt for 15 minutes, which is a quarter of a MWh, which is a problem because the UK uses about 860,000 MWh every day.
Paul Burgess estimates the second largest flywheel installation in the world can power the UK for about one 200th of a second.
A flywheel is like a coal generator the second after it runs out of coal.
Then there’s “The Cost”
Burgess points at a study by Dongxu et al that reviews the costs of supplying energy via flywheels, and its in the ballpark of $1,000 to $5,000 per kilowatt hour. (That’s a million dollars a megawatt hour). It’s 1,200 to 4,600 times as expensive as gas in the UK, and about 100,000 times as expensive as Australian brown coal power.
It’s cheaper to cook food over a pile of burning money.
…the capital cost per unit power of a FESS [Flywheel Energy Storage System] with a rated power of 250 kW and a maximum expected storage time of 15 min is 250 to 350$/kW, and the corresponding unit energy cost is 1000 to 5000$/kWh. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that the unit energy installation cost of FESS will decrease by 35 % by 2030, from the current estimate of 1500–6000$/kWh to 1000–3900$/kWh [14]. — Dongxu et al.
Yet NESO says it will “save consumers money”. Aren’t there laws about fraud or dishonest advertising that apply to statements like these?
Then there’s “industrial accidents”
The same paper mentions that things can get fairly hairy with heavy objects moving at high speeds:
In order to fully utilize material strength to achieve higher energy storage density, rotors are increasingly operating at extremely high tip speeds. However, this trend will lead to severe centripetal stress and potential safety threats caused by rotor failure.
In 2011, two carbon fiber composite rotors weighing 1 ton and storing about 30 kWh failed and began to disintegrate.
Flywheels are also known as “Synchronous Condensers” though coal, hydro, nuclear and gas plants effectively have free flywheels built into the system. The only reason to add flywheels to the grid today is to allow the wind and solar generators to run without crashing the system. It’s yet another subsidy for wind and solar generators, and the costs should be laid at their feet.
The real issue here is that the people running the country are innumerate simpletons, and the professors who know that are too afraid to say anything lest they lose their next grant, or fall off the Honours list, and the journalists are too indoctrinated, and the editors too captured for the bad news to make it to the front page.
REFERENCE
Dongxu et al (2023) A review of flywheel energy storage rotor materials and structures, Journal of Energy Storage, Volume 74, Part A, 25 December 2023, 109076.