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Velkess Energy Storage System (It's A Flexible Flywheel!)
If you're lucky, your solar cells will be able to produce enough energy to last you for when the sun goes down. But how to store that energy? Chemical batteries are expensive, have limited lifetimes, and sooner or later will be subject to resource shortages.
Mechanical means of storing energy have been with us since time immemorial. How about a modern take on the flywheel?
(Velkess flywheel video)
Kinetic storage or the Flywheel has been used since the birth of the electrical system to provide the highest performing, most responsive stabilizing energy available. Traditionally, this performance has come only at very high cost.Velkess has developed a new type of kinetic flywheel that is able to provide the same high performance at radically lower cost.
The breakthrough is our proprietary Flexible Flywheel technology which allows us to produce clean, safe, robust, non-toxic energy storage using low cost fiber materials and fabrication techniques adapted from the textile industry...
Velkess’s flywheel is flexible and works very much like a cowboy’s lasso.
If you haven't read Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent 2005 short story The Calorie Man or the resulting novel The Windup Girl, by all means, do so. One of the key technologies in the post-oil world is the kink-spring, the only reasonable way to carry concentrated energy:
The kinetic man unjacked Lalji’s kink-springs from the winding treadmills and stacked them beside the slavering mulies. Lalji lifted a spring, grunting at its heft. Its mass was no different than when he had brought it to the winding shop, but now it fairly seemed to quiver with the mulies’ stored labor...
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/17/2015)
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