Inertial Energy Storage: How Spinning Wheels Power the Future
This technology converts electricity into rotational energy and stores it in spinning masses like flywheels, with applications ranging from stabilizing power grids to charging
With a weighted score of 4.3, flywheels (with lithium–ion batteries a close second) appear as the most suitable energy storage technology to provide inertia for power systems.
Incorporating energy storage as a virtual inertial course would require fundamental changes in grid operations and market design. Because grid rotational inertia is considered an inherent property of power generation, there is no market mechanism to include inertia generation as an ancillary service.
Although a wide array of energy storage systems has emerged in recent years to fulfill different grid services, not all are suitable for inertia provision (Farhadi and Mohammed, 2015). Among these options, high-power storage systems can best emulate inertia in power grids (Alsaidan et al., 2017).
Inertia from rotating electrical generators in fossil, nuclear, and hydroelectric power plants represents a source of stored energy that can be tapped for a few seconds to provide the grid time to respond to power plant or other system failures.
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