Australia Prepares for a Power Grid Without Spinning Turbines (bloomberg.com) 97
Australia is preparing for its next step away from fossil fuels by creating a market to replace the spinning coal plant turbines that help stabilize the power grid. From a report: The government's adviser on energy policy, the Australian Energy Market Commission, is consulting on a rule change for a spot market in inertia provision, it said in a statement on Thursday. Australia's world-leading usage of wind, solar and batteries has led to "new and previously unobserved operational conditions," it said.
Conventional power plants use turbines that keep revolving even when the fuel that's forcing them to move stops burning. It's a process known as inertia, which helps network operators maintain stability, smooth over disturbances in the grid and prevent blackouts. However, solar panels and wind turbines generally stop and start almost instantaneously -- hence the AEMC's call for other sources of inertia.
Conventional power plants use turbines that keep revolving even when the fuel that's forcing them to move stops burning. It's a process known as inertia, which helps network operators maintain stability, smooth over disturbances in the grid and prevent blackouts. However, solar panels and wind turbines generally stop and start almost instantaneously -- hence the AEMC's call for other sources of inertia.
Two separate issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Stabilizing [separate issues] (Score:2)
This particular work is about stabilizing the grid, not about power storage or baseload.
Flywheels have also been proposed for power storage (I can remember flywheel energy storage work [osti.gov] back to 1980, but probably there's work much earlier)... but that's a different thing.
Re:Stabilizing [separate issues] (Score:5, Insightful)
As batteries have become cheaper and more reliable, flywheels make less and less sense.
Scale up [Re:Stabilizing [separate issues]] (Score:2)
I expect you're probably right (engineering rule: never bet against a technology that's already building millions of units in favor of one never demonstrated in actual use), but there may be scaling issues-- in general, a MW-day worth of batteries is about the same price per joule as a GW-day worth of batteries, but I'm not sure that flywheel storage might not scale up non-linearly.
Re:Stabilizing [separate issues] (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue isn't the batteries, they can respond instantly, it's the inverters. They do not respond instantly. A flywheel or a rotating generator uses its own momentum to smooth out twitches in frequency. That is why a mechanical governor on a turbine is still fast enough to handle a surge in load without upsetting the frequency. The immediate deficit or surplus in energy available is made up by a very small change in rotational speed of several tons of copper and steel.
I spent enough time in engine room upper level watching the governors work on the turbogenerators to appreciate how well that system works.
Re:Stabilizing [separate issues] (Score:5, Informative)
Rubbish.
A bit of background. A while ago Australia installed what was at the time the worlds biggest battery [cefc.com.au]. Not long after a coal fired generator dropped out, as in one cycle the are generating megawatts, the next cycle 50ms later it was gone. I'm not sure what your definition of "instantly" is, but to a computer and an inverter the 50ms AC cycle is an eternity. The battery was in another state, but it had no trouble carrying the load for it's neighbour for long enough for a gas fired plant to fire up. Trying doing that with spinning turbines.
You could almost hear the thud as the power engineers around the country came to the collective realisation that era of using spinning turbines to stabilise the grid had come to an end. It was a major fight to get that first battery installed (it took 110KV power lines being dropped by a storm [wikipedia.org]). After that demonstration of 150MW turning on a dime, they started springing up like weeds. As a consequence, the story is old news. The money AMEO pays for FCAS [aemo.com.au] has been going to grid scale batteries for some time now.
The claim However, solar panels and wind turbines generally stop and start almost instantaneously -- hence the AEMC's call for other sources of inertia is true of course, but is also misleading. It's not instantaneously - it takes minutes for a cloud bank to cross a suburb, or the wind to stop across kilometres of turbines. What's more, it's largely predictable. It takes a coal generator going off line to create an instantaneous, utterly unexpected generation drop out. Where I live it happens about once a month.
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To build on your comment the reaction speed of battery based storage systems is so insanely fast and powerful that the AMEO had to create a whole new market so the costs get accounted correctly for battery based systems. Previous FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services) billed in intervals of minutes because that's how existing systems operated. Batteries and their inverters however have shown to be able to resolve frequency deviations on the grid faster than systems could account for them. Originall
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Inverters certainly can respond instantly. Or rather, within half a cycle of the 50Hz mains electricity, even less with a bit of effort.
To be able to prop up the grid you have to detect when the load exceeds the supply. There are two ways to do that. You can measure the voltage, which takes at least half a cycle of the sine wave, but ideally more because you don't want to be reacting to noise events. You can also measure the frequency, because when spinning generators get overloaded they slow down. Again, t
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The instant response of inverters seems to be the problem. They are too sensitive to noise.
If you'll forgive the sea story, the 400 cycle inverter on the boat was notably less reliable than the 250 VDC to 400 cycle motor generators. Granted this was '70s technology and I would hope it has gotten better.
On the pessimistic side, the inverters on PV installations are a documented reliability problem. And the inverters on wind turbines are not having a very good record either. For that matter the variable frequ
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I hear the work on superflywheels for energy storage - lens-shaped fiberglass flywheels that stressed the glass fibers evenly to near their breaking point throughout the rotor, thus storing an amount of energy near that of burning that much silicon and oxygen into glass - was a casualty of the 3.2 billion settlement of the suit against Dow Corning over alleged harm from leaky breast implants.
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If interia is all that you need...go find a few hundred politicians and ask them to get together to talk about it in endless rounds of discussions.
Politicians being who and what they are will not achieve anything during these discussions no matter how much their press people claim "Progress is being achieved!".
/s
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Heavy spinning stuff, like generators and flywheels do provide quite a bit of inertia, but as you wrote, batteries can respond almost instantaneously, so the need is significantly smaller.
Here in Norway pretty much all our energy is from large-vertical-drop (i.e. very high pressure) hydro-electric generators, so we can handle load changes in a few seconds, while all those massive turbines provide all the flywheel inertia we need if a power plant falls out (400 kV line error?). In combination with onshore an
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Flywheels are only useable for short term storage.
E.g. like trains entering a train station, powering up a fly wheel, and reusing the stored power when departing.
The other problem though is that fossil fuel power also provides baseload power, steady power which does not go off. ...
"Baseload" has nothing to do with "steady power" that does not get off. I suggest to google what "baseload" means
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Flywheels are only useable for short term storage.
A) That is not true. Read the articles I linked to. They are explicitly planning on using ultra-low friction very high speed flywheels for more than short term usage. B) Since the need in discussion is grid smoothing, short term storage is fine.
The other problem though is that fossil fuel power also provides baseload power, steady power which does not go off. "Baseload" has nothing to do with "steady power" that does not get off. I suggest to google what "baseload" means ..
This is an incredible level of pedantry. Yes, baseload strictly speaking refers to the regular load on the grid that is always present. The point which you may be missing is that power sources need to provide for that, so that that is still part of the grid all the t
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A) That is not true. Read the articles I linked to. They are explicitly planning on using ultra-low friction very high speed flywheels for more than short term usage. B) Since the need in discussion is grid smoothing, short term storage is fine.
No reason to read an article which is wrong. It is physically impossible to store reasonable amount of power in a fly wheel to "be a fall back option" of the grid. Any solar and wind power is is connected to the grid by DC/AC and AC/AC converters: they stabilize the
Inertia is not needed (Score:3)
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Once a giant battery bank
There is your problem. The amount of material needed to build a battery bank large enough to cover the needs of whole countries is completely unrealistic. This is a case were the problem is worse than the solution.
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You don't need a battery back that large, not to provide inertia, any more previously you needed giant spinning flywheels to do the same.
For inertial and grid balancing you need quite power which is a signficant percentage, but energy which is much smaller. Inertia is about changes happening over seconds. For intermittent power source balancing you need more energy, but also a variety of sources (which reduces intermittency) and interconnect.
If you listen to some news outlets you will see people saying "bui
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'If you listen to some news outlets you will see people saying "building a battery to last two weeks would costs trillions". Yes, it would. But you don't have to.'
You do if you want a usable supply. Look at the UK, I give the link all the time, where you can see in real time what's happening to wind generation there.
www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind
Two weeks calm is an extreme, though it does happen every couple of years. But one week is quite common. This has to be supplied somehow. At the moment its gas. If y
Flywheels are about percents and tens of seconds (Score:4, Insightful)
'If you listen to some news outlets you will see people saying "building a battery to last two weeks would costs trillions". Yes, it would. But you don't have to.'
You do if you want a usable supply. Look at the UK, I give the link all the time, where you can see in real time what's happening to wind generation there.
But flywheels are about providing power on the order of percentages of the load for times measured in seconds or less. A battery/inverter system that can handle a few percent of a region's load can handle all of its inertia needs for grid stability.
Indeed, some of the time-shifting battery/inverter systems already deployed in the utility grids, though providing little energy storage capacity compared to the grid size, are funded by fees paid for their activity as simulated inertia generators for grid stabilization.
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Indeed, some of the time-shifting battery/inverter systems already deployed in the utility grids, though providing little energy storage capacity compared to the grid size, are funded by fees paid for their activity as simulated inertia generators for grid stabilization. And/or had their construction funded for the purpose ditto.
ERCOT is a leader at this (Score:2)
Texas has a market for frequency response as a service. This encourages renewable providers that help enable fast frequency response rather than relying on the rest of the grid to supply it to them. I expect you will see this more as additional asynchronous sources are added to the grid and traditional inertia is replaced by inverter based sources.
A good overview of this is here; https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20... [nrel.gov]
We are a ways from grid-forming inverters at scale though. The above document should be a mus
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You do not need two week batteries for inertia.
For long time grid stability, we currently use gas which we have to buy much less of because we have lots of wind. In addition we have interconnect to France, which is mostly nuclear, but is happy to save fuel when they can and have and are upgrading our links to Norway which has lots of hydro power, but wants to save water when they can. The interconnect is not enough to cope with peak power supply, but it doesn't need to be -- you can run it at lower rates ma
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www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind
That site is telling you how much power the current wind plants are producing at any given time, historical to exactly now.
It does not tell you anything about all the places in the UK that have strong wind now: but have no wind plant there.
Re:Inertia is not needed (Score:4, Informative)
The amount of material needed to build a battery bank large enough to cover the needs of whole countries is completely unrealistic.
The amount of material needed to build inertial flywheels large enough to cover the needs of whole countries is even more unrealistic.
Batteries have about 20 times the energy density of flywheels, and flywheels lose their energy much faster. They are best for smoothing loads over minutes or hours, not days or weeks.
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> The amount of material needed to build a battery bank large enough to cover the needs of whole countries is completely unrealistic
Iron–air batteries are predicted to have energy densities of more than 250 Wh/kg (theoretical limit is 1200 Wh/kg) . Australia electricity usage per year is about 200 TWh, so hourly usage on average would be about 22830000000 Wh. So running Australia for 1 hour on batteries alone, would cost 91320000 kg of iron.
World uses 1899000000000 kg of iron per year, so Australia
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so please point out any errors you find.
I am gonna be honest, I hadn't followed that development, thanks for making me read about it! No errors found in particular in your reasoning, but I want to follow up on what you said.
First, this technology is not yet in production, and I usually don't like to bet my future on unproven technology. Unproven in the sense that if the production really begins in 2024, we don't know how long it will take for it to ramp up so that it produces enough batteries... Also not taking into account the usual bugs/problem
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Gridwatch is great but remember you are looking at historical data. Wind power dropping in the past was not a problem, because there was always gas. Because it wasn't a problem no one solved it. That does not mean we couldn't solve it, just that we didn't built the infrastructure to do so.
The solution is 1) interconnect to countries not using wind 2) build the wind farms where it is windier and 3) build the wind farms more geographically spread out. All of this is happening. Then you use batteries to cope w
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Total annual eletricity demand.
22,848 TWh
22,848 TWh / 1 year * 100 hour in kwh (100 hours due to the slow speed of getting the power out) = 2.60648962 × 10^11 kilowatt hours /250wh * 1kg = 1.04259585 × 10^9 metric tons.
--
I am a big fan of a pumped hydro, solar + wind solution.
This makes it so if it rainy,windy or sunny you have power.
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The biggest problem is the slow discharge of the iron battery meaning you need 100 hours of storage not 1 hour to have enough to power things.
So to power Australia with iron batteries would take ~5 billion. But this is 100 hours of storage.
--
The cost for the 500 cycles it currently lasts is :
5 billion / ((22830000000 Wh * 100 * 500) / 1 kwh) = 0.4 cents.
The big cost however is the 50% effeciency so double the cost of the energy supply.
With solar being 5 cents ish from what I can see, that brings the total c
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It is not needed today. Historically, it was a very reliable regulation mechanism and there were no real alternatives that could compete. Today, this can be done cycle-by-cycle in software controlling converters backed by batteries. It is high time this was put into production.
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Battery DC, grid AC. The problem is in the interface, the inverter.
Note that going from AC to DC is never a problem either, a big enough capacitor can smooth out AC transients to feed the batteries.
flywheels (Score:5, Interesting)
I had some equipment in a datacenter that had big flywheels. The flywheels would normally be driven by electricity, but the flywheels drove generators that powered the building. When the power went out, the flywheels would keep spinning and providing electricity - zero down time. Then large diesel engines would kick on, and a giant clutch would engage the engine with the flywheel. No matter how much testing an maintenance they did, those clutches would break about 30% of the time when they engaged. Replacements had to ship by truck for days from another state. Hope they have something better down under.
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You probably would want to spin the flywheel with electricity rather than using some mechanical clutch.
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Thing is that they don't spin for that long before slowing down which could affect frequency. If you can keep the flywheels always going with electricity then why do you need the flywheel at all?
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Then you can just skip the flywheel altogether, right?
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The flywheels acts as a capacitor, helping deal with transients and making smoother power output. Sort of like a "water tower" for electricity.
I wish more research into supercapacitors could be done. Those have a lot of promise just because they store energy physically, not chemically, so there isn't anything that wears out or breaks down, and they can be charged and discharged at very high rates without damage.
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Flywheels are more like inductors than capacitors. In fact they generally are inductors, i.e. the motor/generator they are attached to is literally that.
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Flywheels rotate several 100 times faster than the grid frequency. ...
That is why you need a clutch and a gearbox to transform the speed into generator speed
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A moderately large flywheel spinning at 3600 rpm (60 Hz) or 3000 rpm (50 Hz) can certainly store a lot of energy.
Yes, but not long. Because of the earth rotation. The only place(s) where you can store energy long term in a fly wheel is along the equator, with the rotation axis parallel to the earth axis, aka pointing strictly north - south.
That energy will prevent the power from collapsing instantly and can even be used to start the prime mover of the generator. No idea what the "prime mover" of a generator
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Not necessarily, flow-batteries are a thing. But a lot of stuff will indeed be solid-state because that massively increases reliability and decreases cost. Also, doing things like interfacing a HVDC long-range line to a local AC grid has been done solid-state for a long time now. This is not really new tech and it is not really experimental. Grid operators just have a tendency to be careful.
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Many flow batteries have been in development a long time or been completely abandoned. A workable hydrogen-bromine flow battery would be fantastic but it seems like solid-state lithium batteries are going to eat it's lunch before it's ready.
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What about a Zinc-bromine battery?
https://redflow.com/zbm3-batte... [redflow.com]
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If it was as good as it seems then they would be building a lot of grid-scale batteries already.
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And some research activities still go strong or even have real-world prototyped deployed. That is how research works: You look at 1000 things, try 100 and come up with a small number of approaches that work. Your point?
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Your point?
"but it seems like solid-state lithium batteries are going to eat it's lunch before it's ready."
Reading is fundamental.
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Grid-stabilization-only flywheels (when they're a separate machine rather than the inertia of an existing turbine/generator) are connected directly to an "electrical machine" (generator/motor) and spinning all the time. No clutches. When they need to bring additional generation on it's a separate device, connected to the grid purely by its own electrical switching.
They're about keeping the phase and frequency of the grid from flapping around rapidly as the load varies in the short term, by storing and abs
Bad /. title; most renewable power uses turbines (Score:5, Informative)
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They can easily replace all spinning turbines with battery supplied power. The Tesla Hornsdale battery power plant has been doing this for years. It provides millisecond response to power fluctuations (and has been making a lot of money providing this service.)
Time to retire inefficient ancient turbine technology.
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Re: Bad /. title; most renewable power uses turbin (Score:2)
No restrictive patents on Tesla Power walls, etc.
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Re: Bad /. title; most renewable power uses turbi (Score:3)
There are lots of companies making utility scale batteries that can replace turbines. Tesla is just one example. These systems are being installed all around the world.
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In context as a reply to your parent post, your post is a confused mishmash that looks like it was written by a bot, because you missed the point about conflating "turbine" to mean only coal plant turbines.
Batteries are ancient technology too. Hydro/geo/wind turbines are very efficient aren't going anywhere. Gas turbines have never been more efficient than they are today. Steam turbines will exist as long as nuclear power exists even if coal is retired.
Hydrocarbon-fuel specific turbines may eventually go aw
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Time to retire inefficient ancient turbine technology.
You moron, turbines are not ancient - they have only been around since 1850. Batteries have been around since at least 250 BC having been used for such scamming operations as electroplating jewelery to fool people into buying "solid gold" jewelery.
Batteries store power, they do not generate it (Score:2)
This is not accurate. Battery-supplied power must come from some source. That's usually solar panels or the power grid. The power grid comes from power plants. Spinning turbines are necessary components in most power plant formats, especially renewabl
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Thank you, captain obvious.
Don't need to have wind power. Can be solar or any other source of power.
A wind "turbine" doesn't help with stabilizing the power supply.
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Yes, nice clear explanation. Why batteries work for frequency regulation.
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Some years ago, at the COP 15 (Copenhagen Summit), there was a conference hosted by gas lobbyists. Interestingly, they were all in huge favor of "renewables" (wind/solar to be fair), and strongly against nuclear. Simply because they knew that was their way to keep selling that fossil fuel, as we do need some baseload...
Sad to see all those anti-nuclears being manipulated by the fossil fuels lobbies. Sad to see those people calling themselves "Greens", working on behalf of those lobbies to emit even more CO2
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Sad to see all those anti-nuclears being manipulated by the fossil fuels lobbies. Sad to see those people calling themselves "Greens", working on behalf of those lobbies to emit even more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Fortunately for the Greens, Europe's warm winter has saved a number of them from being burned for heat.
A very confused story (Score:2)
"Conventional power plants use turbines that keep revolving even when the fuel that's forcing them to move stops burning."
No, this is not the advantage of the spinning. Of course its not backup for when fuel runs out! The merit of the spinning in conventional plant is inertia which means frequency regulation, and it works when the fuel has not run out.
There are two problems with wind. One, its intermittent in how much it supplies, in GW. You can see this vividly in the UK, which is unique in giving the
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australia has plenty of data available too. https://opennem.org.au/ [opennem.org.au]
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Because that is the only thing that will start fast enough and run long enough to cover shortfalls of wind that can last many days. ... do you learn nothing in school in your country?
Or you could do it like all the existing grids do it: have a fast reacting gas plant for the next 15 to 30 minutes while a slower coal plant is powering up.
Ooops
You do not need a gas plant for weeks, just because you have no wind. In fact you most likely simply import the power.
If there's a near by mountain (Score:2)
EEVBlog Dave Uses Solar - World Didn't End (Score:2)
RefL https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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flywheel on small inverter (Score:2)
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I've got the same problem, scaled down several orders of magnitude. I'd love for my little 600w inverter to be able to handle motors with a much larger startup current. In particular, my chest freezer draws about 1000w at startup, then drops to about 80w after a second. Is there demand to develop a micro-flywheel that can parallel small inverters and help solve this?
You need a better freezer motor, one which starts slowly and gradually builds up to full speed, so it does not require a big inrush of current to start. Such a motor would be complex, probably requiring a transmission.
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Big-ass caps kinda solve (or, well... smooth over) this problem on A/C compressors. Never seen an aftermarket one set to fit a freezer compressor, but the same principle should apply.
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Is there demand to develop a micro-flywheel that can parallel small inverters and help solve this?
Nope. Flywheels don't scale down for crap. To be effective they need to be physically large and the faster the better. But of course a very fast one is also very dangerous. A fat capacitor bank is the safer solution. So far there isn't an off-the-shelf module for microgrids but if you're running a microgrid you're already accustomed to DIY. Maybe you can find or commission a design for a microgrid capacitor bank and build one yourself.
What we need (Score:3)
The thing I really wish we had is an east-west HVDC link. If WA was connected to the rest of the power grid, there would be huge benefits in solar timeshift capabilities.
Tesla does this. (Score:2)
They mentioned in their presentation yesterday that they use software in their fixed storage to simulate inertia to help stabilize renewable heavy energy grids.
Synchro & Reactive Power (Score:1)
Almost nobody knows about AC power transmission and system stabilization but that doesn't stop them from planning to destroy the grid.
K.E. = 1/2 m v2 (Score:2)
Power Grid Without Spinning turbines (Score:2)
They may end up... (Score:1)