ENERGY REVOLUTION
QNETIC MECHANICAL BATTERY
STORE RENEWABLE ENERGY
The sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t always blow. This is the intermittency problem. Meanwhile, fossil-fuelled plants can be powered up and down as and when needed.
The only way renewables can replace fossil fuels is by storing energy. Lots of it.
Storage solutions exist, but they are far from perfect. Some do not scale. Most are too expensive. Some need to be replaced every few years. Some have fire or toxic chemical risks.
To help build the future we want, we created Qnetic flywheel energy storage (FESS).
QNETIC SPECS
Each Qnetic has a huge 2 megawatt-hour capacity. They discharge over a long duration to support the daily supply and demand cycles of a grid that is 80% solar and wind.
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This is the future.
QNETIC ARRAYS
Qnetic connect to form grid-scale arrays of unlimited capacity and power. They charge in the day from solar, and deliver power when we get home from work; they charge at night from wind, and deliver power when we wake up. Qnetic enables the clean grid necessary to reach Net-Zero.
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Qnetic are installed below-ground making them intrinsically safe. Qnetic’s low height easily disappears from sight, preserving the natural beauty around us.
This image depicts a typical battery having 100 Qnetic connected to provide 200MWh of energy and 50MW of constant power—enough to support the average requirements of 50,000 US households for four hours.
WHAT MAKES QNETIC UNIQUE?
HUGE STORAGE CAPACITY
Qnetic smashes the record on capacity at 2,000kWh. Traditional FESS are built for high power, short duration and low energy capacity. Qnetic is the opposite: long-duration, high energy capacity and moderate power. Traditional FESS cannot be scaled-up for the grid: it would be like using a sports car to move freight.
CUTTING EDGE MATERIAL
Crucially, Qnetic’s rotor is not made from metal but from lightweight and high strength fibers. Due to centrifugal force, the heavier it is, the more the material wants to move outwards from the centre, raising the stresses as it spins and limiting the amount of energy that can be stored. Counter-intuitively, the rotor should be lightweight.
Due to the energy equation, if we double the weight, we double the energy but if we double the speed, we quadruple the energy—so it’s much better to be light and go fast than be heavy.
NOVEL LEVITATION BEARINGS
With the rotor fully suspended in free space and guided by electromagnets there is zero contact, zero friction and zero wear. Qnetic will gradually self-discharge but it will take about two weeks.
Levelised Cost of Storage, 2030
LCOS
World energy storage experts from Imperial College London, Dr Oliver Schmidt and Dr Iain Staffell, performed a detailed gold-standard LCOS analysis of Qnetic vs. key competing technologies in a 2030 projection, including assumed cost declines. The result?
Read the full report below. Imperial’s researchers worked with us independently via Imperial Consultants (ICON).