“[The clutch] it’s like 1950s technology — it’s really boring,” Westerman said (“boring” is the highest form of praise for network operators). “The marginal cost of implementing this is nothing compared to the cost of the plant.”
A company called SSS has been building these clutches for decades. One of Townsville’s gas-fired power plants is almost ready for operation in Queensland Siemens Energy completes the conversion into what he calls a “hybrid rotating mesh stabilizer.” Siemens says the project is the world’s first conversion of a gas turbine of this size.
This particular upgrade took approximately 18 months and involved the relocation of ancillary parts from Townsville to make room for a new clutch. So it’s not an immediate solution, but it’s much easier than building a modern synchronous capacitor from scratch and costs about half as much for Siemens.
Some novel long-term storage techniques also provide their own spinning pulp. Canadian startup Hydrostor expects to begin work on a fully approved and contracted project early next year in Broken Hill, a town located in the Up-to-date South Wales interior.
Broken Hill gave its name to BHP, which began in 1885 as a silver mine and became one of the world’s largest mining companies. More recently, the desert landscape played host to the post-apocalyptic car chases of Mad Max 2. About 18,000 people now live there, at the end of one long line that connects to a wider network.
The hydrostor will enhance local energy by digging an underground cavity and injecting air into it; the release of compressed air causes the turbine to regenerate up to 200 megawatts for up to eight hours, serving the community in the event of a grid connection failure and otherwise providing tidy energy to the wider grid.
But unlike batteries, Hydrostor technology uses old-school generators, and its compressors bring extra metal into the spinning process.
“We have a clutch dedicated to New South Wales because they need inertia,” Hydrostor CEO Jon Norman said. “It’s so simple, it’s like the same clutches in a standard car.”
Norman said transmission network operator Transgrid had conducted a competitive process to determine how best to ensure the security of the Broken Hill system in the event it had to operate off-grid. In this analysis, the Hydrostor offer was selected, which involved elementary installation of the clutch during machine assembly.
The project has yet to come to fruition, but if emerging tidy storage technologies stepped in to keep the grid secure, it wouldn’t all have to come from the ghastly gas plants running on the system.
“It’s a different feeling [in Australia]— there’s something that can be done, go after them, put me on the coach,” said Audrey Zibelman, an American grid expert who ran AEMO before Westerman. “When you’re determined to say how best to do it, as opposed to why it’s strenuous or why it doesn’t work, solutions emerge.”