Objectives and Results

The highly volatile energy production increases the need for storage solutions in the public power grid in the near future. Amongst other possibilities a flywheel system can be used to store energy and provide peak load. In the FlyGrid research project, a superconducting flywheel is to be examined in a real application for its suitability as a storage solution for modern grids.

Content and Approach

For this purpose, a system is constructed, which consists of a flywheel and a power converter. The system is designed to have an energy content of 5 kWh and is able to exchange a power of 500 kW with the low voltage grid over the entire operating range. A modular multiphase multilevel converter (MMPMC) with nine voltage levels is used as the machine converter. In a first step, the system will be tested on a power hardware-in-the-loop testbench. Here, the behaviour of the system is examined under a wide variety of grid scenarios. Subsequently, the system will be operated for one year on the low-voltage grid in order to obtain measurement data in a real application and to be able to evaluate the suitability of the FlyWheel as an energy storage device for modern distribution networks.