Hydro One Chooses Flywheel Energy Storage for Wind Balancing  

Greentech Media has an article on a flywheel energy storage company that are building systems for Canadian utilities - Hydro One Chooses a Flywheel for Wind Balancing.

“Utilities are very familiar with spinning steel,” said Cam Carver, CEO of Temporal Power, a Canadian startup with an all-steel flywheel technology. The Ontario-based company is working with Hydro One to provide up to ten 500-kilowatt flywheels for frequency regulation on a feeder that is connected to two 10-megawatt wind farms in southwest Ontario.

Frequency regulation is the sweet spot for flywheel technology, which can quickly respond to the fluctuations on the grid to provide balancing services. Carver said that Temporal’s technology is ideal for providing about three minutes to fifteen minutes of storage. ...

The result is that it can run for up to six minutes at its full rate of power and can store up to 50 times more energy. The flywheels can be scaled to provide anywhere from about 2 megawatts to 100 megawatts. “It’s bigger, simpler, more powerful -- and it’s cheaper,” said Carver. “We’re advancing it, but we’re also making it simpler.”

Hydro One is using 500-kilowatt units, which are under construction now. The flywheels can be matched with motors of various sizes, for a rated power mode of anywhere from 100 kilowatt-hours to 500 kilowatt-hours.