Summary – this article offers compelling reasons for using a flywheel in combination with a diesel generator for UPS. Essentially batteries are the weakest point of any generator, and the flywheel eliminates the need for them, by storing enough energy to start the generator, and to provide no break power whilst the generator is starting. This article is written by and features Active Power who manufacture these systems.

As compared to other energy storage technologies (i.e., flow battery, compressed air, hydrogen, lithium ion battery, etc.), flywheel technology is a very mature, field proven technology. It’s worth noting Active Power was the first to commercialize a mechanical flywheel energy storage system and soon after patented the integration of UPS electronics with flywheel energy storage. Flywheel operation is very well understood and Active Power alone has more than 2,100 flywheels deployed in the field to date with more than 55 million hours of runtime. Flywheels present the most power dense energy storage technology when used as a bridging device between an outage and on to a generator.