[RE-wrenches] kW/MW v. kWh/MWh

[William Dorsett]

But you know they keep talking about the potential contribution that plug-in hybrids might have for storing energy for utility support. Most of our systems have hugely larger capacity than current Prius'. And I suspect that many RE system owners will want some backup, especially if they are compensated for installing it.

Bill Dorsett 
SunwrightS
1715 Leavenworth
Manhattan, KS 66502
Home/Office 785/539=1956
Cell 785/564-2583
wmdorsett at sbcglobal.net

See Amory Lovins July 08 on Charlie Rose
http://www.charlierose.com/guests/amory-lovins

--- On Sat, 1/16/10, Dan Fink <danbob at hughes.net> wrote:


From: Dan Fink <danbob at hughes.net>
Subject: Re: [RE-wrenches] kW/MW v. kWh/MWh
To: "RE-wrenches" <re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org>
Date: Saturday, January 16, 2010, 8:51 PM


Hello Marco.
No d'oh!
Your assessment is correct; you can't store kilowatts of power, you *can* store kilowatt hours of energy.
Author Lyn Corum might have slipped up a couple times in there and dropped an 'h' from the kw, but maybe not -- because when storing energy on a utility scale, the engineers are greatly concerned with how fast the energy can come in, and how fast they can send it out. So when they refer to a '50 kw flywheel storage unit,' that often means the max power coming in or out at any given instant.
In our (comparatively) puny end of the energy storage business, batteries, we rarely have to deal with the issue. Assuming our battery bank is big enough to keep the charge or discharge rate below C10, or even C1, we just stack more inverters.
DAN FINK



Marco Mangelsdorf wrote:
> I’m reading a piece on energy storage in the latest issue of Distributed Energy mag.
> 
>  
> The writer, Lyn Corum, repeatedly refers to the capacity of storage mediums (thermal, compressed air, flywheel, battery) in kW and MW terms.
> 
>  
> Heck, even my friends at Beacon Power refer to their flywheel systems in MW terms.
> 
>  
> Am I missing something here?  Shouldn’t all references to energy storage be in kWh and MWh terms?
> 
>  
> Or am I experiencing a d’oh! moment?
> 
>  
> Marco
> 
> ProVision Solar
> 
>  
> 
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