Brought this thread back out of the mothballs.
It occurred to me that a larger stationary version of this would be the bee's knees to assist wind power generation with shifting winds and semi-abrupt changes in wind speeds. No need to be portable, could be placed on the DC bus of the inverter to provide a means of limiting the power surges into the inverter, scalable, etc.
Placed at substations and point of use, these could be "charged up" at night to help with base loading.
My question is how would you couple power into and out of the flywheel? Obviously you do not want to use brushes and sliprings or communtators. Can magnets handle the forces needed? How fast can the system speed up and slow down in response to abrupt step changes in power flow?
