Europe’s largest hybrid flywheel-battery storage project – the first ever in the UK – is to be installed at a University of Sheffield research facility near Wolverhampton.
The system will be used to provide frequency response services to help integrate volatile renewable generation into the power grid.
The €4 million project is being developed by consortium made up of Schwungrad Energie, Adaptive Balancing Power, Freqcon and the University of Sheffield, and is being supported by €2.9 million of funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 scheme.
Schwungrad Energie will coordinate the project, Adaptive Balancing Power will supply the flywheels and Freqcon will design and build the multi-source power converters to connect them to the grid.
The hybrid system will initially be piloted for six months at Schwungrad Energie’s storage facility in Ireland, where the company has already demonstrated the technology as part of a separate project with Irish grid operator EirGrid. To begin with it will feature two flywheels with a combined capacity of 500kW and 10kWh.
Following the pilot, the system will then be shipped to the University of Sheffield’s research facility at Willenhall near Wolverhampton, where it will be integrated with an existing lithium titanate battery with a capacity of 2MW and 1MWh. Two additional flywheels will be added, doubling the flywheel capacity to 1MW and 20KWh.
The flywheels will also be configured to work in unison with an 800kW lead acid battery and numerous second life electric vehicle batteries which have already been installed at the site.
Jake Bracken from Schwungrad Energie said: “When implemented at commercial scale, the technology will assist in overcoming the challenges of operating a power system with increased levels of renewables.
“The adaptive flywheel and multi-source inverter being demonstrated by this project have the potential to increase the competitiveness of the solution.”
The performance of flywheels does not degrade over time in the same way as batteries. Dan Gladwin from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Sheffield told Utility Week they can therefore be used to extend the lives of battery storage projects, bringing down costs.
He said the flywheels in a hybrid system can be used for short term actions, leaving the batteries to take over when the flywheels are up to full speed or at a standstill: “This effectively is then acting as a low pass filter, meaning that the battery only operates for extended periods of frequency deviation.”