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Why Spinning Steel Still Matters in a Digital Grid
ABB’s win in the UK’s inaugural inertia auction reminds us that sometimes, simple physics beats cutting-edge silicon.
The UK now has an active market for grid inertia, marking a significant step toward ensuring stability in an electricity grid increasingly reliant on intermittent renewable energy sources. The first successful bidder to provide this inertia service was a notably straightforward yet effective technology: an electric motor spinning a massive heavy metal flywheel paired with a condenser, an electrical component used to store energy electrostatically in an electric field, also known as a capacitor. According to ABB, the global technology giant that provided this solution, established industrial technologies continue to play critical roles in modern grid management.
This brief explainer article on inertia, its value propositions for the biggest machine in the world — our electrical grid — and how it is changing was based on a request for clarification and expansion on the transcript of the recent discussion I had with Mark O’Malley, Leverhulme Professor of Power Systems at the Imperial College of London and founder of the Global Power System Transformation organization. The entire conversation was about inertia, but that was the starting point…
