Indian Flywheel Energy Storage

In “ Flywheel energy storage systems: A critical review on technologies, applications, and future prospects,” which was recently published in Electrical Energy Systems, the researchers explain that FESS are an optimal mechanical storage solution under high energy and power density, higher efficiency, and rapid response.

Energy is stored in a flywheel by converting electrical energy into mechanical energy in the form of rotational kinetic energy. The principle of rotating mass is used. The energy fed to a Flywheel Energy Storage System (FESS) is mostly dragged from an electrical energy source, which may or may not be connected to the grid.

Thanks to the unique advantages such as long life cycles, high power density, minimal environmental impact, and high power quality such as fast response and voltage stability, the flywheel/kinetic energy storage system (FESS) is gaining attention recently.

Indian researchers have assessed the full range of flywheel storage technologies and have presented a survey of different applications for uninterrupted power supply (UPS), transport, solar, wind, storage, flexible AC transmission-system (FACTS) devices, and other applications.

The use of new materials and compact designs will increase the specific energy and energy density to make flywheels more competitive to batteries. Other opportunities are new applications in energy harvest, hybrid energy systems, and flywheel's secondary functionality apart from energy storage.

While many papers compare different ESS technologies, only a few research, studies design and control flywheel-based hybrid energy storage systems. Recently, Zhang et al. present a hybrid energy storage system based on compressed air energy storage and FESS.