The Mechanical Battery Explained - A Flywheel Comeback?

Why is it that everyone will always be claiming that it is so expensive to charge up a flywheel with kinetic energy and it is not.
I can do it constantly and with little to no effort or energy required to charge said flywheel. So if I can do it so cheaply then why is it that you all claim that it is so expensive to accomplish?

I spent a few years researching high speed flywheel energy storage for a wealthy Texas philanthropist. We used a toroid magnetically levitated in a vacuum. No frictional losses. The materials were exotic, the machining tolerances and balancing were critical. Also any spinning mass must be gimballed, because as the earth rotates the flywheel wants to stay in the same plane.

I don't know the numbers for flywheel tech. I do know them for compressed air. Please show a comparison

I keep hearing this over and over and so far nobody has done an installation, do you know one that is functioning and productive? Not prototypes, but real examples where it is being used.

Correct me if I'm wrong but centrifugal forces don't exist right?

We need a single, vacuum-sealed, magnetically-levitated flywheel around the Earth's equator. No friction, even from precession, and would balance power demand from all over the world.

gyro provides fixed angle*** not fixed altitude to the ISS.

How does the gyroscopic aspect factor in?

When I was a kid I doodled out a design with a e-bike using a flywheel mounted in the main triangle of the bikeframe. Spinning in the direction of travel. The flywheel would be clutched into both the peddling and separately the drivetrain. When the battery is full, it spins up the flywheel. When the bike has stopped, it still could be charging up.

You can just raise a rock in the air and it is the same thing pretty much

It would seem that flywheels would be an ideal solution for home energy storage. Where disruption of power supply is not uncommon. Secondly it could reduce energy demand on the grid by powering the home for several hours per day with recharging and redeploying a snap. A win win for home owner.

This seems to be a good solution for stabilizing the output from local sources and prevent power-surges. Typically in solar or wind farms with semicloudy sky or unstable wind. The advantage is that flywheels are technollogically very simple and do not require any rare metals to function. Some flywheel-based machines have operated for a century with good maintenance.

Wait, what? Why does a flywheel only last 20 years? You talked up the longevity, and then it's lifespan is a mere 20 years? You really should have elaborated on how flywheels can wear. Even solar panels last longer! Most tech in our lives last way longer... 20 years?

Yes, solar and wind are only 5 percent of the source worldwide, but here in the USA, it's more than 20 percent. Yeah, a lot of people forget that most of the USA's power comes from renewables. Due to the context of your words, I feel a bit like this was you intentionally making things sound worse than they are. Remember, you have to account for people who still think that the USA is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses (even though it's very easy to debunk that myth, it's very common to hear from activists). Other countries are doing much better too, of course. I feel that by citing only worldwide numbers, it can take people not realize how shockingly quickly renewables are being adopted in some countries.

So is a flywheel a perpetual motion machine?

you can stack up springs, springs like in wrist watch, and store potential energy.... but no, US wants to technologicaly make something complicated, so they can sell patents afterwards.......scam of the century

If there was just ONE THING that humans learned in the 20th century, it is that moving parts suck.
And heavy moving parts are the worst of the worst.
So, if you want to lose all your money, invest in this ridiculous mechanical insanity.

I love old school mechanical batteries!

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A more simple storage of energy is gravity. Windmills can pull weight up (by electricity but also directly). No wind let it go down and produce electricity.
Same as tides.

Lets put our trust in the Lord Jesus❤

Thanks for the clip. I did not get a sense of how flywheels store energy from your clip.
I'll relisten

Sadly, mechanical storage technology won't be as profitable for mining companies as lithium ion batteries currently is.

KOM TER ZAKE MAN JE PRAAT COMPLEET NAAST KWESTIE EN REKT ALLES ZONDER IETS TE VERTELLEN ENKEL BLA BLA KOM TER ZAKE MAN

YOU TALK MUTSCH BUT NOT TO THE POINT

These and modern gravity storage systems (not hydro) are very promising for future energy storage. It's obvious lithium isn't long term viable with the limited resources required.

Flywheels were (and maybe still are) used in commuter trains. Large, high mass, relatively slow speed flywheels work pretty well to conserve momentum for vehicles that start and stop often like In commuter trains. But the much smaller and less massive ones that are needed for passenger vehicles would require very high speeds to really work and bearing technology isn’t up to the task and failure could be very dangerous. Better to use breaking to charge a battery or capacitor. Not as efficient but immeasurably safer.

I love old tech, people are so prone to discard old tech for new tech, to me the tipping point was watching a video of one of this products in kickstarter it was a "robotic" system to control the shower temperature, and then I saw another of a mechanical engineer using a syphon. And as a software developer myself I apply this on my code and this is why I have avoided overcomplicated and unnecessary tech like virtual doms.

Nasa used them in the Apollo program

Remember we can have clean energy but aircondictioner are our bigger concerns

Why not make a hybrid where you can use the extra speed and use a breaker to slow it down and it goes to a cell storage.

I worked at a lab in Cambridge with a large turbomolecular pump that was spinning at about 27,000 RPM. The rotor vibrated and struck the stator. This resulted in a catastrophic failure that would certainly have killed anyone under the vacuum chamber when it failed. While I realized that a flywheel does not have a stator, it has far more energy by design. A bearing failure could be catastrophic. This does not preclude their use, but it would obviously be a serious design constraint.

If i could sit under a popular tree and hear a redwing black bird song and the laughter of my children I would have all the energy i need.

I was curious about what would happen if you used flywheels as a home energy storage solution, so I did a paper napkin calculation of how many 20 kg weight lifting plates it would take and how fast they would have to spin to store enough energy for one day. I don't remember the number, but I remember it being like 2 orders of magnitude higher than I thought it would be. Then I thought about how easy it would be to spin up just one plate with pedal power and how little power humans actually output, and then it all made sense. Flywheels would be a terrible idea for home energy storage, especially as a DIY solution.

Time to examine developments in gravity batteries.

What is Matt’s background ? Engineering ?

Could of made some terrible dad-jokes on 'flywheel' but besides that....... great as usual👍🏽

The thing I find most annoying about the whole conversation is that all mention of the pollution released mining for the materials used to make lithium batteries is excluded.

There's an Israeli firm that sells this product which is in the form of a small shed (a few meters/feets building) which stores energy for electrical car so it can fast charge them (transformers for fast charging of cars is extremely expensive so this is an alternative)

Nic. Tesla imagined a pump that would grossly outperform any pump created today, but the problem was that it spun so fast that it would fly apart. Based on flywheel construction reaching multi-k rev/min do we still not have the technology to produce a pump, or generator that can match what he imagined?

We need to work harder to condense the time line on power advancements. The key is to onboard risk management to newer tech and bring online ASAP. That's it.

... including combustion motors.

In Brazil Flywheel is called "volante" or "massa de inércia". It is used to load a bit of energy only for short moments that require more energy to active some mechanical device.

I've always found the idea of storing electricity using large resiviors pumped up mountain's.

lol fake news.

Do you ever get the distinct impression we are devolving but are being sold this idea as somehow better?

I imagine there have to be spring related anergy storage devices. Lifting a weight could be another way. I would like to discuss this and more with you. Do you have an email I could reach you at?

All the time and effort building these battery packs in different forms, just build more nuclear power plants jeez it's not hard!

I think the issue is lack of total power, right? You talk about hundreds of Kilowatts or tens of megawatts, which is next to nothing in a world that uses 25 Terawatts. Total Energies and Power just aren't there.