Enabling the future of electric transport.
The grid commonly provides around 50 kW - 100 kW yet ultra-rapid EV charging requires up to 350 kW. There are many places where the grid will never be upgraded - the cost or years of delay would never warrant it just to serve electric vehicles. The best option in such situations is to use energy storage to buffer the grid.
Grid boosting scheme
Grid boosting is simple. When there are no vehicles to charge, the available grid energy slowly charges up a battery or flywheel. When the vehicle turns up, that stored energy is released rapidly through the charge point and into the vehicle.
As an example, it might take 30 minutes to charge the flywheels and it could then discharge through the charge point and into the vehicle in 5 minutes, giving 100 miles of range for a typical sedan.
Why use a flywheel instead of a battery to do this job? Lithium-ion batteries degrade with use. Their limited number of charge cycles are fine in a car. For grid boosting though, they have to be massively oversized to handle the high charging power and repeated charge/discharge cycles. They are expensive to buy and maintain for this application. By contrast, flywheels can charge/discharge constantly, at full power, with almost no wear.