Temporal Power Ltd. of Mississauga has installed flywheel power storage systems in Norfolk County, where Ontario Power distributor Hydro One will be testing how to smooth regional fluctuations caused by the large number of wind turbines in the area.
Excerpt from Globe and Mail article:
Temporal’s flywheels are, essentially, mechanical batteries that store power in the form of kinetic energy as they spin – unlike normal batteries that hold power as chemical energy.
A Temporal flywheel is “charged” using an electric motor that turns a huge rotating steel cylinder. The motor converts electric power to the mechanical momentum of the rotor, and the rotor speeds up. To release this stored power, the motor switches to become a generator, as the slowing rotor transfers its energy back into electricity.
A flywheel can almost instantaneously switch back and forth between loading up on power and releasing it – a characteristic that makes the technology attractive to electrical system operators that constantly need to balance supply and demand.
Globe and Mail photo
