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A comment on The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months. Parent comment

Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months by fanf2 on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @04:15AM (#11626939)
The JET fusion reactor in Oxfordshire uses flywheels to provide very large pulses of electricity for short periods of time (a minute or two iirc). The reactor requires too much energy to run directly off the National Grid.
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Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months by zeristor on Thursday May 05, 2016 @02:47PM (#11638761)
As I recall from a tour I went on of jet 30 years ago there are a large bank of flywheels which spin up over several minutes, these are then rapidly discharged to a bank of capacitors which are then used to power the experiment, I believe the duty cycle was 9 minutes. [1][2]

I believe some electric cars used capacitors to store regenerated electricity from breaking.

"More Ampères please Mister Woodbine." - Road to Welville

[1] - http://pia.sagepub.com/content/200/2/95.abstract

[2] - http://www.euro-fusionscipub.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/...

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Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months by runholm on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @04:41AM (#11627036)
Sounds like they use it for high output rather than efficiency though. Still interesting that it has real world applications though. Shows that the technology has potential as well.
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