Re:Green steel without green hydrogen – can it work?
by pfdietz on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @08:33AM
(#30359694)
There is one variety of flywheel that evades this problem. The magnetically confined kinetic energy storage ring levitates and confines a rotating ring via magnetic forces. The mass of the magnets and tunnel required scales in proportion to the radius, while the energy stored scales as the square of the radius. This does not violate the virial theorem, since the design is taking advantage of the underlying bedrock to carry the confining load.
It's a rather whacky idea, and as far as I know it hasn't been looked at for decades, but it is out there.
Hydrogen is much less efficient that batteries, but much more scalable. That makes it attractive for taking in large amounts of over-produced electricity, and for use-cases where you need hydrogen anyway rather than meaning to turn the hydrogen back into electricity.