Adaptive Balancing Power is a young company at the frontier of innovation against climate change. With its novel flywheel energy storage system, it addresses the integration of intermittent renewable generation and the increase of efficiency in a variety of applications. These include the recovery of energy in the mobility sector and in industrial processes. In each case, the flywheel is used to store excess energy that can be released in times of energy shortage.
Increasing the share of renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency is paramount to decreasing CO2 emissions. This is in line with the Renewable Energy Directive, that requires the EU fulfil 27% of its energy with renewables by 2030. To reach these goals, conventional power stations are being replaced by renewable technologies.
On the onset of the project, the objective was the investigation of the business cases for dynamic grid balancing in interconnected grids. While this application for the energy storage system holds great potential in CO2-savings, the market itself is highly regulated and competitive. The prices for Control Reserve are declining, while investment costs in battery infrastructure are decreasing faster than even aggressive forecasts expected. Already at the begin of the project it became clear, that the Control Reserve market is unattractive for companies based on venture capital funding. Following this observation, the focus of the project was put on less regulated markets in the electric public transport sector.
