I love things that are not called "game changers" or "disruptive technology" because they usually just work. Like the Idea of more trains.

Just a quick general comment: Dave provides one of the best, top-notch coverage of current energy/environment related news and comment that I think I've come across on the net (similar channels good channels _Undecided with Matt Ferrell_ , others) . Dave's channel is current, detailed and accurate, balanced, no-nonsense, very professional with an occasional dash of humor without being tedious or ridiculous and without annoying 'commercial interruption' or irritating and uncecessary music intos. Dave's _Just Have a Think_ is one of the best.

the revolutionary pun was spectacular

In my former career, we used flywheels to manage fast acting power transients to minimize battery discharges of our UPS systems. It worked and lead acid battery longevity was marginally increased but the system is is tricky because loads are rarely stable. The result was somewhat unsatisfying because depending on the load, the flywheel/battery system often competed for the same job thus efficiency suffered. The market moved to LIon which satisfied the desire for longer battery life. Now that LIon batteries are projected to be less economical to emerging storage systems, sodium based type batteries, and with improvements in control systems for the DC portion of these systems, flywheels are getting another look. We’ll see if they become more desired in the future.

Your pronounciation of the (for foreign speakers) rather impossible name was excellent. Compliments

An important reason for the use of flywheels is that that can simulate an important characteristic of rotating generators, that of inertia. Dave mentioned inertia but did not explain it's significants as it is a bit tricky. Rotating power generators typically produce AC at the frequency of the grid. If grid frequency falls the rotating mass of the generator puts energy in so resisting the frequency drop and vise versa if the frequency rises. It's a head ache for grid operators as more and more generation is replaced with DC sources that are then inverted to AC by electronic equipment as they do not provide the frequency stabilization of rotating machines. That's where fly wheels come in, not just as another way to store electricity.

Flywheels and sand batteries - I love the simplicity of these inventions.

Dave, The South Australia grid provides an excellent example of what can be achieved with a few synchronous condensers (Fly wheels). SA has had access to large amounts of solar and wind generation which means that at times it could theoretically run at 100% renewable. However AEMO has placed a requirement for a certain amount of synchronous generation in the energy mix as a contingency for any grid disturbances such as the separation of SA from the rest of the Australian grid. Until recently they would dispatch around 20% of the load as Gas generation and at times order gas generators to stay on line despite falling spot prices. In order to avoid the need for this expensive generation they commissioned 4 Syncons which are now currently operational. These machine spin up and provide the same inertia service as the Gas generation without the cost. It's seems like the Gas dispatch is now below 5% in these high VRE scenarios. In recent days they hit 100% renewable generation for around 10 days continuous. Of course SA also has 2 Grid forming inverters as well, originally at Dalrymple and now also Hornsdale. At the time they made the Syncon decision I don't think the GFI technology was there. I am not sure it would be the same decision today.

Enjoyed many of your videos. This one reminds me of a flywheel my friend added to his bike in around 1970. One lever used the flywheel to brake/stop the bike and a second to use the energy to accelerate the bike up to about 25 or 30 percent of the original speed. A fun experiment.

It was nice to hear your spin on it!

Kudos for a (near) perfect pronunciation of Heerhugowaard! And more for making the effort.

Every major airport has been doing this to “keep the lights on” reliably for decades. “No-break” generators are usually only activated when critical weather is expected, but they were tested regularly for functional operation, back when I was a tower ATC in the 80’s.

On a much smaller scale, flywheels ("flywheel battery") are being manufacturered for computer rooms. They allow the UPS to run for a few minutes until a generator can be brought up without requiring batteries.

Dave, Thanks for raising the flywheel subject. My understanding is that the retirement of conventional generating plant - with its inbuilt spinning inertia - is causing a lot of concern over grid frequency. One point that you didn't mention is that synchronous generators are directly connected to the grid without intermediate power electronics - unlike battery storage. Most grid faults have a duration of around 100ms (before a breaker trips) and these directly connected generators have the mechanical oomph to push through it. This is because their windings are not current limited in the same fashion as power electronics. It is important to differentiate between the need for grid stabilisation and fault tolerance and the completely different need for deep storage to facilitate intermittent generation from solar and wind.

I did some work in a nuclear power plant. They used a 2500 lb flywheel for emergency power for rod drive motors. During an emergency and lose of all power the flywheel would provide enough power to the rod drive motors to get the reactor control rods all the way down. The set up was, a small motor/generator was coupled to a flywheel which was coupled to the rod drive motors. During normal operation the motor/generator would run continuously. With total black out the control rods would fall about 90% of the way then the flywheel would provide enough power to the system to get the control rods the rest of the way.

Great Dave, thanks. Keeping it simple is best for most things with moving parts. This application seems ideal. Best wishes for 2023

I hope these flywheels don't literally fly as happened at a military communications site which used a flywheel to keep the station going in the event of a power outage until the standby generator was brought on-line. The flywheel flew through the generator hall roof when a clutch failed.

I saw the bus example near the start of this video. In the West Midlands we have a little "Parry People Mover" running between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town rail stations. I heard someone say it runs off a Ford Focus engine because it of course makes use of the engine to store energy when it's stopped at a station.

There is an application of flywheels to recover energy from electric trains slowing down as they arrive at a station and then providing energy to accelerate them again as they leave a station. Typically such trains use a bank of resisitors to dump electrical energy at the station to slow them down. The resistor banks cannot provide energy for accelerating the train as it leaves the station but a flywheel can! And the discharge times required for accelerating trains (50 to 300 seconds) and the power (1MW) is ideal for flywheels - sitting in between capacitors and batteries. I am connected to a developer which is working on this and am convinced this is a good application which can provide quick returns based on electical power saving. I worked for BP as a young research engineer in the early 1980s when they were developing a flywheel for a bus so flywheels have been of interest since then!

Flywheel expert here. As a child I had a steamroller ( about 30 cm/ 1 ft ) long which ran with real fire and steam. To start it moving I had to give the flywheel an initial impetus.

Happy New Year sir!

Happy New Year everyone and thank you Dave for yet another great video! More than 10 years ago I was working on a datacentre project and wanted to use diesel power generators that had integrated flywheels as a way to get rid of UPS batteries. The idea is that a major datacentre only uses UPS batteries as a bridge during the transition from the grid power to the power supplied by diesel/gas/... generators. We are talking about seconds from the moment when the power grid fails to the moment when the power generators have kicked in with a stable power supply. Instead of using batteries for this, flywheels would be more than capable of providing enough power for a smooth transition. The downside was that generators with flywheels were more expensive and you would have to have regular maintenance of the flywheels, while also needing to switch to power generators even in cases of relatively short power cuts. On the other hand, going away with batteries was a huge plus - batteries need a separate climatised room, they need to be replaced every 3-5 years, depending on the number of cycles and eventually there are expenses related to old battery disposal. Those are huge savings if you can avoid using batteries. Nowadays, the ecological aspect is even more pronounced when there is a shortage of lithium and other rare earths. We were also looking in some other ways of being efficient, like using excess heat in winter for local orchards and residences, heat pumps, solar panels... Unfortunately, the project never materialised because of local political instability and hence the reluctance of the investors to go on with the project. Therefore, I have no first-hand experience on how the technology stacks up against UPS batteries and if there are some other issues that we hadn't foreseen. I would really like to hear if there are people out there with hands-on experience, as I am actually quite surprised that this technology hasn't picked up. Either there are issues that I am not aware of or this technology needs to be marketed much more. If this can work, then you can imagine what savings could be made all across the world and the number of batteries that we would not need anymore (and think about energy wasted on mining for the ores, production of batteries, cooling the battery rooms and finally on recycling and thus all the pollution that would be avoided).

Thanks for keeping tabs on flywheel subject, I agree it's not going to disrupt everything but it's fascinating development non the less

Thank you for giving attention to the solutions that use basic kinetic forces. PS. Your pronunciation of "Heerhugowaard" is actually very good. Only our hard G (throat clearing) was missing, but that can be expected from any non-Dutch speaking person.

Data centres have been using flywheel units for backup power for well over 20 years. I don't know about earlier but when we were designing colocation centres in 1999-01 they were a viable option, developed if I remember aright in germany.

Very complete, but could've included a few physics concepts. Energy stored increases with the square of the spinning speed. The main limiting factor is tensile strength.

I think the overall simplicity of a big spinning mass is great for longevity which overall should reduce the lifetime environmental impacts as well as spreading out the system cost.

One of the hydroelectric turbines at Cruachan Power Station is now being permanently used as a flywheel to stabilise the grid frequency.

In a thermal power station (coal, nuclear, oil…) the steam turbine rotor typically weighs about 10 tonnes and the alternator rotor around 15 tonnes - all spinning at 3000 rpm synced to the grid. Usually the alternator operates in an atmosphere of Hydrogen to reduce friction. This really helps with short term stability. Obviously solid state inverters driven by solar or wind don’t have this inertia so need to replicate this mechanical inertia.

Got to love your wry understated humor

Loved the torque produced by the flywheels in my Triumph motorcycle engines.

Thanks Dave - always greatly appreciated: yours is the go-to site for news on renewable energy solutions and other aspects of the absolutely huge disruptions that the human race is on the cusp of as the mainstream media don't seem to find these things very important (although a large number of them are funded directly or indirectly by the incumbents, which explains a lot).

The big motivation for syncons is for 'fault clearing current', which is their ability to provide up to millions of amps to trip all the breakers, and fuse any bad links or shorts when something goes wrong. The longer term energy storage is insignificant in most applications.

"Inconvenient random combustion." Too funny. Good episode!

I do love your slightly apologetic 'jokes'. They never fail to make me smile or even, on occasion titter.

About 100 years ago in 1968 I think it was, I commissioned an emergency generator that had a flywheel running continously to bridge the gab until the diesel took over if needed. That was for the airport in Sidney in the good old days working for GEC Aust.

I wonder if we could design wind turbines that drive multiple long cylindrical flywheels in series in the tower housing and have the generator at the bottom and then tap the inertia regulated power from there

The "revolutionary" was actually really funny. One simple but good joke every other year is much funnier than the alternative.

Thanks for that welcome update on flywheel use in energy storage and regulation. I wonder how the flywheel solution would compare to super capacitors as both seems solutions to the same issues with battery storage and share a lot of the identical advantages.

Thanks for last years postings and letting us join your voyage into logic vs vested interests as we get closer to Climate Chaos! I live in hope for 2023!!

They sound like the way to go, in conjunction with sodium batteries and wind and solar. They don't use toxic, rare materials and they last a long time. Great! Also, not long ago, pundits were saying that solar and wind would never be affordable, and look what happened with them.

One of the positive attributes of rotating machinery used for power generation, such as a gas turbine, is the contribution of “spinning reserve” to help stabilize the grid. Going down the road of adding more renewable energy and adapting rather than replacing the existing infrastructure is the best play long term.

Your pronunciation was actually not that bad! Great and informative video.

Happy New Year, Dave!

I've been harping on about this for the last 15 yrs, so good a variety of old greener tested solutions are becoming part of national infrastructures.

Dude, your graphic effects are giving me life!

I've always been a fan of flywheel energy storage.

I like that there is no spin to your information, I get tired of the news channels and such for spinning the info .

About 20 years ago, I had the idea to do something similar using a flywheel array attached to a sort of treadle sewing platform for very busy areas like a train station or airport. The millions of people walking daily across it would push the platform downward, getting the flywheels spinning and generating power from it

Hi Dave, you may have missed that in the UK, a decommissioned gas fired power station was converted to be a flywheel, basically they used the generation set!

MIT,s fusion experiment has been running a 218 ton 2 piece flywheel over 30 year, and the 118 ton version for years earlier. The 118 ton flywheel is a retired New York City Transit Authority cross compound steam turbine generator. 50cycle They have the generator from the low pressure half @180 MW. They don't have a 300,000 HP steam turbine so they spin it up to speed with a 2.000HP electric motor and then engage the field and the 118 ton field acting as a flywheel dose the rest. They get 180 MW for 5 or 10 seconds, then they start all over again. After several years the wanted to increase the duration, so they add a 100ton fly wheel between the motor and the generator.

Happy New Year's! I loved this one.

Tanks for the update. There is, however, a misinformation that seems to be everlasting. You mention the ingredients of Li-Ion batteries to be rare earths and metals. This might be true for metals such as Co in Li-ion systems, but it is certainly not true for rare earths. These chemical elements form a specific group of 17 metals, some of which are indeed rare and hard to come by. But none of these are found in Li battery systems. They are components of powerful magnets for electricity generation or in EVs, a fact which has been brought up to denounce electric road transport and wind energy generation altogether. If stated wrongly - and you are by far not the only one - that rare earth elements are used in batteries, your statement might be used to discredit regenerative energy systems. Which obviously is contrary to your intensions. It could be worth devoting a youtube presentation to the role of rare earth elements in the transition of energy generation and electric transport.

I remember the flywheel buses, and how they were going to put an end to air pollution. And there were all sorts of machines, from auto engines to sewing machines, that had big heavy spinny things in them.

Your pronunciation was very good! Looking forward towards all your videos this year, happy new year everyone

I hope you come out with more innovation with flywheels. The new technology is turning out to be very interesting

I do think flywheels will scale well. And that was a revolutionary pun! You brought both joy and pain to many with that one.

30 years ago was a company around called magnet motor in starnberg near Munich. i think today they are called Renk Magnet Motors and are mostly in military. Back in time they did Busses with e-drive per wheel and diesel engine to power all. To give the system an enegry storage for some minutes a fly wheel storage was atached. The thing, to be in a bus, had to be mounted cardanic. I was told that one prototype was run against a wall in a coal mine to get aceptance for public transportation. The coal mine because fly wheels can become nasty when stoped in an accident. There is a lot of energy in storage.

A very valuable video on Flywheel Energy Systems. Loved it.

Thanks. Excellent overview.

I think if cities used thirsty cement to reduce flooding and sand mining helping ecosystems. Also better insulation will reduce energy demands too if all buildings where updated with more and better insulation. Also lining sides of roads with native plants like flowers bushes succulents mybe a few trees. Why to reduce noise and air and ground pollution thell even reduce flooding and wind damage.

Happy new year I wasn't expecting a video today but it's appreciated all the same

I work in the norwegian offshore oil industry and we have started using flywheels (for some reason called Powerblades) on drilling equipment to reduce fuel use.

Other than passive solar systems ( which we should be employing everywhere for domestic hot water), this idea would help to smooth out many alternative renewable energy sources at nearly all scales. Thanx for adding this thought to my forebrain!

Wishing you and your family a blessed & prosperous 2023. Thanks for another excellent video topic. Under a distributed energy scenario, each region should take advantage of all local geo-physical assets - this could be geothermal, ocean, conduit hydro, dam hydro, pumped hydro, turbulent hydro, clean waste-to-energy, energy from poop, wind and / or solar backed by whatever energy storage makes sense (liquid metal, sand, carbon dioxide, flow, gravity, V2G, ocean or whatever they think of next). I don't think there will ever be a single solution to our energy needs. But, of course, energy efficiency at all levels is critical to reduce energy demand - the less we need, the less we need to generate. Energy generation - and the type of tech available to generate it - also depends on what it's needed for... commercial, industrial, residential or a combination of each.

Compliments of the season Dave. Missed you last week , hope you had a good Christmas and new year. Great work. You come to me on a Monday morning. I wish every day was a Monday.

you should check out the South Australian grid mostly solar and wind with gas and battery backup. recently installed SinCons to help frequency.

I think storing energy to give it back over night might be an important application, so if it lasts from peak renewable (probably at noon) to maybe eight in the morning, that’s 20h. When you need longer storage, you probably need a different solution. We need a comparison video with compressed air, or those “lift some weight to a higher place”-thingies. Here is my crazy idea: liftable houses! - Maybe when building new houses they could have two layers of foundation with a bladder of water in between, that pumps / expands and contracts with the weight of the house on top: no need to build the weights separately (as concrete produces CO2). And when the nearby river floods, you just pump up your house out of harms way (and even store a little bit of extra water; assuming you could draw the extra water from the same river). Houses would kind of have an extra level of basement full of water. Maybe it could even double as a heat sink for air conditioning, or as a cistern for the dry weeks of the year. - just add some water storage to every building. - Oh, wait: that’s a kind of water tower…

Na energy storage and flywheel storage hybrids seem like the best option, smoothing out the charge/discharge times and keeping the cheeper Na batteries healthy for a longer time, kind of like a battery with a super-capacitor but on grid scale size.

Brilliant, I love this!

so many wonderful things that are going to change everything, soon, very soon. maybe.

This video makes me think about a flywheel/Sterling Engine combo as a device that could be built on a model basis and scaled up for residential power backup usage. This is especially true when one puts the flywheel into a vacuum container.

These projects are important, and so is shining a spotlight on them (as you continue to do in an entertaining and comprehensive way, good job once again!). Lithium cost evaluations are subject to change. Really, Lithium is valuable because it is LIGHT weight. Do we need light weight for stationary objects? (Probably best NOT to use all our limited supply of lithium in applications where weight doesn't matter. Save it for moving objects, yes? That's something "cost tables" overlook.)

Great video as always.

I love the spin you put on that revolution thing... 😆

Keep the jokes coming!

Happy New Year and thanks for another fine video. As you correctly point out, there are several pieces to the sustainable power generation/grid stabilization puzzle. One might ask how much room for improvement in efficiency is there and what are the practical implications? At 92% efficiency obviously, theoretically, there is about 8% left to improve upon. If it took a day to spin down a flywheel running at 92% efficiency, how long would it take to spin down at 99% efficiency? The increase can't go linearly with efficiency boost since at 100% it never stops. At some level one probably has to feed energy into the system to combat friction so even 99% may be a pipe dream.

Brilliant idea

I treasure your installments.

We've been here before. In the early 1970's the Rabinhorst Super flywheel was going to do everything you have noted, along with being placed in cars to allow for smaller engines while still allowing for quick acceleration on hills etc. I wonder what happened then? It does make sense to add flywheels to say, solar systems or windmills to level out battery supply voltage. It could of course run on the production side as well when voltages start lagging as batteries deplete.

Flywheels fascinate me. I've always felt there is some hidden potential yet to be discovered that will revolutionize their use. Hard to defy physics though. Great content per usual. 👍

Not the first video I've seen on the subject, but probably the best explained.

You are a really good presenter. Your explanation was fantastic.

A few years ago I had an idea for a 100' diameter rotating ring rotating and floating in a level trough using maglev and vacuum. It seemed to me that so long as it was strong enough to remain a solid ring, you could spin it up to arbitrary speeds. I wonder, however, if there would be issues relating to precession?

I like the new title cards and graphics. Makes things look tidy and professional like it's on the same shelf as PBS

I just bought a flywheel (kinetic) woodsplitter. Speed and power were my main goals but it also turns out that I am using about 1/3 as much gas as my old hydraulic one. It saves energy because it gets a charge between splits while I am picking up the next piece to split. It is brilliant and I love it but it is a very specific application. I imagine that in the right niche this could also help the grid as well by smoothing out solar spikes from clouds perhaps..

One of the greatest sci-fi channels.

Thank you for explaining this

I love flywheels and I loved this video. Thanks. 😍🙌

On a small, residential scale, I think combining wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro generators (where available) with flywheel storage makes for a completely reliable system. Even with the loss through friction over time, their ability to spin up quickly and maintain maximum rotation with little input while you are generating electricity from your various sources means that even if they run out of stored energy while you’re sleeping, a)you won’t need the electricity then anyway; and b) they will easily power back up again the next day from the excess energy you’re producing throughout the day. Very cool.

Larry Niven, sci fi writer, wrote about this decades ago, in one of his "Stainless Steel Rat" books. The "motorbikes" the cops were chasing him on, had a spinning flywheel, plugged in overnight and spun up to tremendous speeds. Great for a chase. Jim and his new bride eluded them, tho I don't remember how.

Really enjoy ur programs 🤓

So Wise , Thank You. I hope they work

As usual great informative video Dave, and your dry humour is icing on the cake. 😂

A great item. a few additional points to consider: (1) the use of electricity generating flywheels predates battery energy storage by decades, they were called synchronous compensators and they provided a number of electrical services in addition to inertia; (2) these new electrical flywheels are not "completely safe", there are risks in containing such large quantities of energy e.g. if the bearing oil system failed then (in the Moneypoint example) up to 600MW seconds of energy could be dumped into the bearings and they would promptly melt, no longer stabilised the multi ton flywheel may have enough remaining energy to jump off its bearings and exit the building at speed

I worked in San Francisco when a flywheel-based uninterruptable power supply failed. This was back in the 2000s, and it seemed half the major sites on the internet had gone down, because they were all hosted at 385 Main Street. It was the first time I'd heard of a flywheel used for power, but I'm sure the tech you describe here leant from that mistake.

Lithium battery factories and the suppliers of raw materials can't keep up with the demand for energy storage. Flywheel system factories use a much different set of raw materials. New flywheel factories are unlikely to suffer supply constraints. The demand is huge. Assuming they can get costs down into the same neighborhood as battery based systems, they can profitably be run at full capacity for the foreseeable future. There are market niches where flywheels can demand a premium price. Examples include very hot locations, and applications where there will be many very brief cycles.

At last someone who understands what grid batteries really are, an electronic flywheel. Also worth mentioning that in the peak industry years, at least in Australia, during the 50's through 80's factories would have large synchronous motors running usually driving air compressors or process pumps, whose job was to smooth out jolts and dips being transferred back onto the grid supply. This was achieved in two ways, by adjusting the rotor excitation the pf of the drive motor and therefore the reactive load imposed on the grid could be held to acceptable levels and secondly the large inertia of the motor and driven compressor supplied rotational inertia (spinning reserve) to the local grid, reducing the effects of equipment like presses with high cyclic loads on the grid. With modern solid state motor controls and the general loss of manufacturing at least here in Australia most of these grid stabilising systems have been lost. Trying to visualise the transfer of energy back and forth across a grid while maintaining frequency and grid voltage within bounds just makes your head hurt.

Excellent, thank you.

Very interesting way to generate power!!