Archive for Storage
The value of electricity storage to the UK power system
Posted by: | CommentsDave,
I’ve got around to looking at the value of storage and have prepared a simple model to assess this for the GB system, copy attached (in Excel 2007 containing a couple of macos).
I’ve taken some sample days of historic price profiles from the www.bmreports.com website – two for each month of the past year to represent business and non business days. The first thing to note is that for the UK system there are two quite different profiles for the system buy and sell prices, with the buy price often being a lot higher than the sell, especially at peak price times. This is important for storage, as the energy is purchased at the buy price and then sold at the sell price. This compounds the effect of the overall cycle efficiency. Read More→
Active Power Article – Flywheel energy storage
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Summary – this article offers compelling reasons for using a flywheel in combination with a diesel generator for UPS rather than a battery UPS. Batteries are the weakest point of any generator – their maintenance is easily overlooked, and the flywheel eliminates the need for them, by storing enough energy to start the generator, and to provide no break power whilst the generator is starting. If battery UPS is used, this has a limited run time – maybe 20 – 30 minutes, after which time, everything is down unless a generator is installed, so why not put in the flywheel and diesel gen set in the first place, since this will give unlimited UPS.
This article is written by and features Active Power who manufacture these systems.
As compared to other energy storage technologies (i.e., flow battery, compressed air, hydrogen, lithium ion battery, etc.), flywheel technology is a very mature, field proven technology. It’s worth noting Active Power was the first to commercialize a mechanical flywheel energy storage system and soon after patented the integration of UPS electronics with flywheel energy storage. Flywheel operation is very well understood and Active Power alone has more than 2,100 flywheels deployed in the field to date with more than 55 million hours of runtime. Flywheels present the most power dense energy storage technology when used as a bridging device between an outage and on to a generator. Read More→
Electrical Energy Storage: applications, markets and technologies
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The energy storage industry is assured of a successful future. There will be setbacks in these difficult times, of course, in a sector that has many vulnerable pre-commercial technology developers. However, storage has all the attributes of a cornerstone technology, enabling real progress in areas that are certain to be of huge significance:
- the effective use of renewable and distributed energy resources
- better utilization of assets within the electricity supply industry
- secure power provision, both at end-user sites and within the ESI
- sustainable motive power for road vehicles and other mobile applications. Read More→
