Power boosting for railway power systems with flywheel energy storage system

The concept of energy storage is emerging as a solution to energy management, energy savings and performance improvement for power systems. From different technologies available, Flywheel Energy Storage Systems (FESS) are gaining importance because of high energy density, large number of discharge cycles, long lifetime, future potential advances and reduced costs for few minutes discharge time. In this thesis to integrate FESS in the railway power systems as a solution to overcome line voltage drop and irregular peak power loads is motivated by an economic evaluation of the installation. Three different cases are studied in order to retrofit to current Swedish network with the aiming of: improving energy transmission by delivering power on time between two traction stations; absorbing regenerative braking energy and delivering it when a train is moving from a valley to uphill; and reducing the peak power requested in current traction stations.