 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. And welcome to Stanley Energy Man, Stan Osterman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies under D-Bed, State of Hawaii. We're here for business. That's what we mean. We mean business. And I'm wearing a brand new law shirt thanks to my wife. So honey, thanks for the shirt with my constant theme of fishing because I love fishing. So now you know what to get me for Christmas, fish hooks, lures, whatever. Anyway, good to be here today. And we're going to be talking about one of my favorite things. You know, when we deal with innovation, new technology, a lot of times we're thinking cosmic computer stuff and programming and folks that do hacking and things like that. And all this really neat technology that's whiz-bang and high electric and everything. And we don't think about it, but innovation really also means taking technology we've already had for a long time and applying it in different ways that we never thought of before to make a difference today. And that's what today's show is about, is about taking some technology that we've actually known about for probably at least several thousand years and applying it in a high tech way today that makes a big difference in our energy world. So today's guest is Elizabeth Dunn from Aberkinetics. And she's here to talk about flywheels, which I'm telling you. My engineers at Burns and McDonald that work with me, you know, Brian Wubbins is here on the third Friday of every month. When those guys, I told them they had to use a flywheel somewhere in our microgrid. They started freaking out. They like diesel generators. They didn't want to use anything different. But once they started studying the flywheel technology, they were like little kids in a candy store. They were, they could hardly wait to start using this stuff because it solves so many problems that they have. So Elizabeth, welcome. I'm glad you could be here today because I really, truly am excited to talk about this technology. Thank you, Stan. And as you said, my name is Elizabeth Dunn. I'm the senior business development manager with Aberkinetics based here in Hawaii. And I appreciate that introduction. I think the key word there, innovation. And Aberkinetics has developed the world's first long duration energy stored flywheel. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But it's very exciting technology. So we move into renewable energy and integrating renewable energy into the grid. So thank you for having me here today. No, I agree. It is exciting. Tell us a little bit about how you got into doing what you're doing with Aberkinetics now. And what got you here to Hawaii doing what you're doing with flywheels? Well, I've been in Hawaii since about 2005. And my background is actually environmental law and community organizing. And now renewable energy as well. I started working with Aberkinetics in 2016 after the demonstration project in partnership with HECO and the Elemental Accelerator came to fruition. And I was brought on board to connect really to explain Amber's technology and connect with the community. Amber's very committed to in places where we are looking at putty and projects and putting in projects to really working with the community. And so that's when they brought me on board. And now I've shifted into this role also as a business development manager. So looking for additional opportunities in Hawaii. Is Amber a locally established company or did I know they're part of they were in the energy, old energy, etc. Now it's Elemental Accelerator. But that's how they got their start. Are they but are they a Hawaii company or did they come here? And this is one of their first projects here? So the demonstration project is our first project here in Hawaii. But they're not a Hawaii based company. We have projects looking at projects all over the world and based in Union City, California. OK. Yeah. OK, so let's talk a little bit about the innovation part, the technology part. Maybe you can give us an idea of how the heck a flywheel becomes part of an electrical system. Well, I'm going to start with this video we have. And it's called it's a short one minute 30 second video. And it's called how a flywheel works. And I think it gives a good visual demonstration of what we're going to be talking about. OK, Robert. Roll tape. And energy storage flywheel is a good way to store energy from renewable sources such as the sun and wind and also traditional energy sources. Here's how it works. The electricity drives a motor which spins a steel flywheel. Its motion stores kinetic energy. The flywheel spins easily because it's in a vacuum sealed container levitated by a magnet and riding on special bearings. It can reach thousands of revolutions per minute. Then its speed can be maintained with the same amount of energy that it takes to power a light bulb. Energy flows in when it's available. The flywheel can be charged at eight kilowatts for up to four hours. When initiated by the control system the electric motor becomes a generator turned by the momentum of the flywheel. Energy flows out when it's needed. One unit can deliver enough electricity to power the equivalent of 25 average American homes for an hour. The result is utility scale energy storage. And unlike batteries, flywheels can perform for decades at full capacity and they are easily recycled. So basically a flywheel has that motor attached to the bottom and when you have electricity that you can store like the curtailed power from a wind turbine or from a solar array you can use that electricity to start spinning the flywheel up to speed and get it rotating and spinning. And the longer you have electricity going to it the faster it spins and the more it's spinning and the faster it's going the more energy it's actually potential energy it's retaining. And then when you want electricity you basically don't put power to the motor you put the forces on the flywheel to the motor and the motor turns into a generator and pushes the power back into your electrical system. Really elegant solution I mean very efficient quick responding it's one of those why didn't I think of that you know kind of a v8 moment for most engineers when they actually think about what this means. In fact the comment from my Burns and Mack folks was this is the ultimate in spinning reserves. Now yours is a little bit longer duration but for them it was just amazing how much power the flywheel can put back in the system as quickly as it can versus more conventional things like it's right there with capacitors and supercapacitors to put a lot of power right back into the system right away if the system has a big surge requirement for electricity. So yours was eight kilowatt was that did I see the screen right was it? Yeah that video is about our m32 model which is eight kilowatt hour and so describe the the project that you're working on and how you're trying to prove this technology and what kind of system it's in things like that what how are you using this. Listen yeah you highlighted some of the benefits of the flywheel I think you did a good job of highlighting some of those and I'll just talk about a few a few more and one of it is a spinning reserve so our long duration so it's kinetic energy and our long duration flywheel you think about it as having a different it's a different function than those short duration flywheels which a lot a lot of people are more familiar with that and the long duration really acts like and would be in instead of a chemical battery so the lithium ion battery so it serves that function but also has some additional benefits and some of those include the fact that there's zero degradation over time there's a 30-year lifespan of these they're 90 percent steel so I think it's a spinning steel motor. Not much asthma out there. Okay and there's no there's no chemicals involved they're quiet and the air they're recyclable I mean the steel is recyclable at the end of life of a flywheel so there's just a few of those benefits from I think really an environmental and sustainability standpoint which is part of what intrigued me with with amber kinetics technology especially when we look at our island here and waste stream issues end of life waste stream issues what are we going to do with chemical batteries and disposals and there's also the fact that the zero degradation means that you have your flywheel system and you can add units so the M32s you can just add on as many units as you can scale up and right now we're looking at a 16-unit project with West Boylston in Massachusetts and that's the size where then you know I think a good step toward looking at on a slightly larger scale than what we have with the demonstration projects at Campbell Duster Park that's just one one flywheel unit one M32 unit and that's really so we're running a lot of different tests there on how it works with that PV integration and just really giving HECO the ability to play with it to see how it's going to be serving a lot of the needs you know of the grid so to put it in perspective if if your flywheel provides what was it 40 kilowatt hours was that the right number I'm just kind of recalling up to the screen how many kilowatt hours so the M32 we have eight kilowatt hours for the M32 model and in our project line of development we're we'll be looking at models that have you know larger so eight kilowatt hours for people just kind of watching and don't have an energy kind of focus eight kilowatt hours is about one-third of all the power I need for my house for the whole day so one of their flywheels can provide my house all the power it needs for most of the day probably at least a good third of the day maybe in the end of the day I need two more your flywheels to cover it completely but it could also take up all the shock loads and everything else so the typical house in Hawaii between two and four of these flywheels could actually not going to be their battery to store energy if you had renewables and wanted to do it and I guess that ideally you'd want to balance it with some battery and some flywheel and some renewables and and have a little more flexibility to it but is that a pretty good picture of how it would apply for a house well so the example we use is kind of you know relating it's putting it in terms of something people can relate to the say 25 homes for for one hour so the eight kilowatts would power 25 homes for for one hour and just to just to kind of clarify because that example helps us translate into how we can imagine that energy being used in our daily lives but the this isn't for a residential application it wouldn't be you know like a Tesla battery with it with a house this is really in a in an array there's a flywheel control system that controls the units and and so but that's a good when you talk energy storage you basically are talking kilowatt hours amp hours or kilowatt hours so right like the buses that we have that are hydrogen fuel cell they have lithium batteries 28 amp kilowatt hours worth you know so when you talk energy use or energy storage energy plus time being kilowatt hours yours can do eight kilowatt hours worth of energy storage for for anything could be for residents could be for a shock load pickup could be for multiple residents for short duration so it can actually cover a lot of different uses it can be a quick pickup like in a in that spinning reserve application right or it can actually be longer term storage for for a house or something with maybe a small battery piece to go with it but but it could actually pick up the load for a whole house if you sequence them in and and let them go yeah I mean it can store and right that is one of the benefits just being able to sit and store energy and as long as it's got just a tiny bit of charge it can just store the energy you know in that in that flywheel for charge and discharge and it can cycle multiple times per day so the advantage to that with again zero degradation so you can then run the flywheel you know multiple times which is a huge benefit as we increase the renewables on the grid for example being able to have that flexibility is a significant benefit it actually makes it so that when you compare the cost it's actually the flywheel is lower cost over time than a lithium ion battery and much lower cost yeah and it's important to to to to focus on those aspects and the attributes of the of the but I really do tie into that kind of bigger buzzword of sustainability but no it'd be a much lower cost and like you say the other pieces that people forget about when we talk about storing energy is the safety aspect you know the environmental issues with end-of-life disposal or recyclability of the and sustainability of the asset people forget that lithium batteries at the end of life are not a whole lot of fun to deal with environmentally and so you know having the right combination I'm not saying give it a lithium batteries that's not the answer but applying the right technologies in the right place to make the most sense for any application and that's where an electrical engineer comes in handy to tell you okay you have this much solar or you need this much solar and you need this much battery and you need maybe this much flywheel and that gives you the most flexibility and and the best you know fit for your application whether it's a house or condominium or or a business or industry how it all works together it really takes that kind of sophisticated engineering thinking to put it all together but the amazing thing is this technology is another energy storage medium that that really can fit in a lot of applications so we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk more to elizabeth and learn more about flywheels and what they're going to do for us here in hawaii i'm jay fidel think tech think tech loves energy i'm the host of mina marco and me which is mina marita former chair of the puc former legislator and energy dynamics a consulting organization in energy marco mangos dwarf is the ceo of provision solar in hilo every two weeks we talk about energy everything about energy come around and watch us we're on at noon on mondays every two weeks on think tech aloha a lot of energy man on my lunch hour of course and we're here with elizabeth done from amber kinetics to talk about flywheels really cool stuff that the ancient man started carving rocks and making wheels and had no idea he'd be in the electronic industrial age thousands of years later we're still doing wheels but thanks for being here and okay we left off talking about some of the applications um let's talk a little bit more on the technical side now these are pieces of equipment that like the average flywheels about how heavy um so the flywheel that we have at the demonstration site that's the m32 models about five tons five tons so ten thousand pounds yeah and they are 98 steel so okay and they spin up but everybody like that works with cars and stuff understands that you lose energy with friction so you have bearings that obviously don't have a whole lot of friction potential in there can you describe those yeah so i will describe what i know about the bearings not not being the engineer but the um there is a magnetic lift involved which significantly reduces as you mentioned friction is the big as a big issue and so that significantly reduces the amount of friction and the amount of wear on those bearings allowing it to smoothly rotate with with very little little friction there and so how often you have to to maintain or change these bearings so the first scheduled maintenance on the flywheel actually is the bearings um and that's not until 10 years out so your first scheduled maintenance is 10 years out yeah that's right that's pretty nifty yeah try and get a car that you can do that yeah and that's again part of the elegant solution piece you know even your maintenance is low when we look at different energy generation technologies like wind power and solar more waste energy and things like that um we also have to look at the operating costs of the equipment and solar is just wash the wash the panels down from time to time and maybe have to change some components out depending on how how quality what their quality is and things like that but um this is pretty basic and like 10 years to the first major maintenance pieces it's pretty awesome yeah we have zero variable operations and maintenance costs so that is a huge advantage so when when they build these flywheels balance is also probably a really critical part so on the installation side the the guys installing this equipment or the the winning manufacturer it um they probably have to spend a fairly large amount of time to make sure they're perfectly balanced to get the best operating um bang for the buck as it were a lot of these correct um so i don't know as much about the the actual manufacturing and to to create that balance but yeah i would i would say that they certainly are um designed so that they are balanced and they're placed in um the containment system so in the ground so that the demonstration project that we have at Campbell industrial park is actually above ground but normally it's below ground so it's actually just digging out below ground and then there's a capsule containment and then the flywheel unit is actually lifted up by a crane and placed inside that capsule and then that's covered up and so that's actually another advantage is that it's a very low profile in terms of just even view planes and kind of aesthetically and and so that's how it's placed in there and balance is important although i will say that we have zoned for earthquake rating so um something that's probably been on people's minds a bit with um recent activities on the big island um so that's um that's what we currently have being in places where there are you know earthquake risks and okay so what are some of you got a test model going on in Campbell industrial park you got other projects on the mainland what's what's amber kinetics view of where they see themselves fitting into Hawaii's clean energy future where we're going to be all renewables which means a lot of storage required um for those nighttime hours or no wind hours or you know our renewables only can do so much for us um at least intermittent renewables that we're looking at right now that's right so where does amber see itself in Hawaii's market for energy storage that's right so you know energy storage is key if we're going to be able to achieve those renewable energy goals and i think that there's been um increase in and recognition of that so uh one way is is really providing a diverse option for energy storage um another is just actually some of the benefits that the fly will provide like ramping up so quickly to being able to charge and discharge at you know less than a second rate so that's a significant advantage multiple cycles per day as i was mentioning as we add more renewables that multiple cycles per day is going to be you know very important um and then the um you know looking at when we see these really large projects and you know it with solar plus storage so applications of the fly will there's um a lot of different different ways and one is utility scale um utility owned projects another is um solar plus storage projects and even in a micro grid um situation so there's a lot of flexibility and depending on um you know the location and and um and all that there's a lot of flexibility for how um the fly will can help Hawaii meet those meet those needs okay well one of the things that i think people don't realize too is on the grid right now you have Hawaiian electric that is running generators for one reason one reason only spinning reserve i mean they're running them because they have to but they're they're not doing they're not pushing any load out they're just there and they have to be they have to be spinning they have to be working in case that surge hits because it's a it's a millisecond kind of they got to kick in quick so if nothing else at the power generation sources they could be spinning you know large scale arrays of these flywheels just to cover their spinning reserves which require a lot of input really quickly for short duration until they can spin up more power from their big their bigger generation capacity and but it gives them the time to spin it up and that seems to be a really great is that what he goes looking at now in camel well i would make a distinction there and again it's between the long duration versus the short duration flywheels and so kind of really mimicking a generator exactly you know as you said the generator has this very specific in a way it's being used and so mimicking a generator is really more of a short duration flywheel type um service and the long duration flywheel although it's much quicker as far as ramping up and responding than i believe you can do with chemical battery right and still a long long duration energy storage you know type solution that does meet i mean it certainly plays all those roles and like energy arbitrage meaning demand frequency regulation shifting you know all of that is what the what the flywheel can do and do it really efficiently and in a in a more environmentally sustainable manner so even in the family of flywheels there's different applications and different designs yes definitely so how would a um how would a um more of a short duration high output flywheel differ from what you guys are demonstrating at camel industrial park in terms of a long duration do you have any concept on that yeah so our long duration really if you think about like the four-hour duration right now we have it charging up it's starting at you know the speed so the speed of it is actually still 3000 rpms at rest because of the flywheel has a little bit of charge to start up and you think about it charging it's ramping up and we have a graph that kind of helps you know illustrate this that i don't have with me today but it you know ramps up and then it reaches its full state of charge and that takes a bit over four four hours so more than like four and a half hours just because of the it is a little bit of loss in that in that process and then you discharge you have the full that's four hour time duration because there's no loss there and discharging that and so it's eight kilowatt steady eight kilowatt hour discharge steady discharge rate okay so to increase the capacity so with the m32 flywheels that are discharging at eight kilowatt hours you would add more flywheels like i said you can kind of just add more flywheels depending on what your storage needs are and as we look at the um you know as we look at the future models that we're looking at will be the um able to increase the amount that that can be reserved and held in that in the flywheel and that can be um discharged so that number of eight kilowatt hours will will then increase and with our you know future okay one of the questions i always get asked um or or basically when i'm talking to battery people and they're and they're trying to compare batteries to hydrogen they keep saying well for energy in to energy out nothing can be batteries um and that speaks to efficiency you know there's always loss in heat or something um when you're manufacturing hydrogen from electrolysis you know you use a lot of electricity to make the hydrogen how much energy do you get back how much efficiency and generally speaking for for hydrogen it's like 50 percent 50 to 60 percent internal combustion engines for fuel in to power out is like 20 to maybe 38 30 percent you know in that range what is the approximate range for a flywheel in terms of amount of energy in to amount of energy out at the shaft there so the range so the amount of energy um say if i understood your question right so basically as as a charging app and the energy is being stored then it charges up and then you can then give a command to release that release that energy and so that's like that steady duration of the eight kilowatt hours release and so how quickly it can it can it can ramp up to that very quickly like it can start charging and respond very quickly and less than a second and it can also start discharging very quickly so that's part of the the efficiency and the response and they would say you know it's not just dumping a bunch of energy into like a battery storage bank and then releasing it once per day you think of it as like a very you know it's dynamic it's charging up okay so so when you apply power to that motor to get the things spinning up to its max rpm or its operating rpm it takes a certain amount of kilowatt hours to get it spun up there versus the eight kilowatt hours you're going to get out of the other end so that would give you your efficiency so like a hundred percent efficiency is i put eight kilowatt hours of power in and i get eight kilowatt hours out so you know do you have any idea of how much extra energy it takes to get the things spinning to its its max is it like maybe 10 kilowatt hours to get it spinning up to its speed but then you get eight kilowatt hours back i'm asking you this cold so i don't yeah no i appreciate the question and i'll qualify my answer by saying that i'm not an engineer but i will say that um so my understanding is that like i said the resting state basically with very little input like basically the energy to power light bulb is 3000 rpms of the flywheel so there's always some you know this kinetic energy concept is what one of the things that i think is really cool and fascinating about and i'm always continuing to learn from our engineering team you know how it works and so that makes it so that instead of having to it'll get you will be able to charge it up to it immediately be able to get it charged up basically in less than a second charging up where my understanding is say the chemical battery says that you might have to overcharge up more and then you actually are putting in like so that it's it's you can basically go straight from that state to like adding that energy um and then it'll and then it'll just like smoothly add up that energy until it reaches full capacity and then you're able to discharge it so i think a lot of your engineers that question i will yeah because that's actually one of the things that comes up a lot in these discussions is comparing side by side the technologies right how efficient are they at taking power from a source storing it and giving you power back right and i'm sure that some folks would really be interested in that so maybe you can drop me a note after you ask your engineers and i'll talk about it next week on the show i will yeah it's very it's basically very minimal loss um it seems like it would be especially with frictionless bearings it should probably be pretty minimal it's very minimal it's basically just going but yeah i would like to be able to to double check and answer that question but i'm sorry to ask you a question you couldn't answer on the tv but we'll get the answer we'll we'll shout with everybody out next week always better to make sure that you have the right answer than to make one up so yeah i agree so we'll get we'll get an answer out of your engineers and i'm sure the folks would be curious to hear about that but believe it or not we've ramped through 30 minutes of showtime already and i want to thank you again for being here thank you that was introducing everybody to flywheels and amber kinetics and we're going to have you back probably once you're well into your project out in camel industrial park and um you get some feedback and tell us how things are going and maybe uh come up with some more applications and things that or maybe contracts that you get here to be in micro grids or whatever that'd be awesome that sounds great and i will be at verge hawaii next week so um good point yeah for everybody out in the audience the energy conference at the hilton hawaii and village next week called verge um get down there and check it out we'll be doing a hydrogen panel on thursday and there's a lot of great presenters and great you're gonna have displays out there too we'll have a display with the elemental accelerator boost okay great yeah so please come find me if you're if you're there and i'd love to chat more and i'll have to answer all the questions or if i don't i'll give them even the power in the power out okay Elizabeth thanks for being here and thanks for being with us on stan energy man today and we'll see you next friday after verge aloha