Hi Robert.
Great piece and great site. I included you in my blog roll. Jeez the poll outcome was a bit daunting.
The technology I was following that had great promise then disappeared was the high speed flywheels, or kinetic batteries. They were small, heavy and fast (40,000 rpm). Maglev bearings, in a vacuum. The magnets impregnated in the flywheels were used to both spin up the wheel with computer controlled electromagnets, then used to create the filed through a stator to recover the energy. Two were mounted, one on top another, spun in opposite directions (otherwise the gyroscopic stability made steering tough). A really neat feature was, for lots of energy you could spin the wheels up quickly, or for much less power you could do it overnight.
The only hint I found why this didn't reach market was, the thought of a 40,000 rpm heavy wheel coming loose in an accident. There still would be a good application in solar homes, one would think
There's rumors of a video of a flywheel coming apart explosively and killing people in the lab. There's a whole lot of energy stored in these things. I'm sure you're sensitive to the needs of a paramedic crew to be able to extricate people from a wreck, without worry of a high-energy-density device undergoing an unplanned self-destruction!
And yes, there's a company associated with Texas A&M that's prototyping a 10mW geothermal, closed-loop generator that uses a flywheel of this sort. Wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine a 20kW system for household use.
Great article - thanks!
I have a great song for your Prius driving friends at my myspace page at www.myspace.com/themandolinmaniac titled "Prius Envy". I hope you give it a listen and have a laugh.
Tnx again - Tim
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