The mechanics are quite popular.

About a year ago, I was listening to Science Friday on Talk of The Nation, and they were talking about daily peak energy usage, and what it takes for a coal plant to try and predict usage so they're not caught with their pants down.  Basically, [most] coal plants don't have a place to put excess energy for later use.  I started looking into this right away and learned a few things that helped me piece a new idea together.  Or so I thought.  It turns out it's another "rollerblade" so to speak.

The worst part of rollerblading is telling your parents you're a dandy fop.

So, anyway, peak usage hours, problem, wasting energy, etc.  Hydro electric dams have a handy little trick up their sleeve for such issues.  When the dam is producing more power than is demanded from it, it uses that power to pump water upward.  The dam will have a smaller, higher reservoir specifically for this task.  Now, all the energy that would have been wasted, has turned into potential energy in the form of water + gravity.  When the dam needs extra power, they release this water and it powers smaller turbines that can almost instantly add an auxiliary power source.  It's a miniature version of itself essentially.

The solution was made because you can't just flick a switch in a dam and start making more power.  You have to deal with massive machinery that probably has a longer checklist than a helicopter inspection to get it started properly.  So the smaller water pump, and smaller turbines act as a giant battery backup for the plant right?  It's a huge pond that acts as energy storage.  I love this idea, massive energy storage, and I know most coal plants don't have any giant batteries so to speak.

Look at the size of that battery!

From Wikipedia
"Electricity is transmitted in a closed circuit, and for essentially any practical purposes cannot be stored as electrical energy. This means that changes in demand can not be accommodated without either cutting supplies (as by brownouts or blackouts) or by storing the electric energy in another medium."

A water pump isn't a bad idea, even for a Kansas coal plant, but it seemed a bit more troublesome to deal with.  Some plants have figured this out, and the right environment allows it to be cost effective, and there are some plants in Washington and Oregon with a potential-gravitational-energy-water-resevoir-battery thing.  So I went off in search of energy storage solutions that weren't electrochemical (real batteries) or anything that required too much time to transfer back and forth from the 'cells' or would require giant reservoirs.  And, like the inline skates, it's been around since the Enlightenment [earlier?].  The Flywheel!

Pretty simple huh?  Spin a top (giant heavy top) on magnetic bearings in a vacuum and it doesn't lose much energy, slow it down with an alternator, and it's electricity again.  A flywheel farm outside of EVERY coal plant.  It works pretty simply.  The more mass your flywheel has, the more energy it can store.  At high speeds, in the past, even iron flywheels would break apart from the stresses, but now we have better technology in carbon fiber, and super strong composites that will stay together at 40,000 rpm.  This idea has already been used for some time at data centers and server farms on the small scale for an un-interruptible power supply.  I thought, ok, large scale then, for the whole nation of power plants.

This was going to be one of my drawings for my portfolio to get into design.  I thought it would show how broad I can think.  Turns out my 2d graphic art would suffice, but it's been on my mind a lot none-the-less.

Well, to my surprise, my once a year Popular Mechanics Christmas gift had a title across the page, "10 Top Tech Trends of 2011".  Doesn't really roll off the tongue.

So what was number 1?

Flywheel Energy Storage!  Specifically for the task of battling peak power usage for a power plant.  It also mentions "One solution that has been talked about for decades (emphasis added) is the use of flywheels..."

So, for this and other reasons, I'm determined to stay on top of the blog.  Yes, apparently this has been going around for over 20 years, but still, due to my crap research, I was able to come up with it all by myself.  Seems like I should have found all this information before Popular Mechanics made an article about it.  Must my research improve?  One of the books I'm reading says maybe not, at least during the conceptual stages.

Either way, my mind is right there with people who are actually getting things done.  And that feels good.

On side note, someone is laying 100 giga-bit per second fiber optic cable.  This was number 10 on the same list.  We really did used to call it an 'information super highway', but it's really just now that we've started laying the highways out.

GeorgeP