Power quality for offshore drilling, without chemistry on the platform.
A voltage drop stops a pump. A membrane sticks. The damage is immediate and physical. A Teraloop flywheel sits inline and supports the voltage in under 10 milliseconds. No chemistry, no fire risk, no replacement cycle in a 25-year platform life.
A flywheel energy storage system on an offshore drilling rig is a kinetic energy storage device that catches voltage drops and grid disturbances in milliseconds, before they reach the platform's pumps, motors, and process equipment. Because it stores energy as the rotation of a sealed flywheel, it contains no flammable electrolyte, no lithium, no electrochemistry of any kind. That makes it the only short-duration energy storage technology that can sit inside an ATEX or IECEx classified zone on a drilling platform without compromising the area's hazardous-area classification.
What a voltage drop actually does to an offshore platform
Drilling rigs run dozens of large rotating loads at the same time: mud pumps, top-drive motors, drawworks, cementing pumps, separator pumps, gas handling. Each one draws hundreds of kilowatts to multi-megawatts. The platform's generators are sized to feed them, but generators react in seconds, not milliseconds.
When a voltage drop arrives, whether from a generator transient, a starting load, a fault on the platform, or a transformer event, the milliseconds before generation responds are enough to:
Drop motors below their minimum holding voltage and trip them offline.
Stop a positive-displacement pump mid-stroke, sticking valves and damaging membranes.
Knock out a critical control loop, triggering a process shutdown that takes hours to recover from.
Trigger overcurrent on the bus as motors restart simultaneously, cascading the disturbance.
The cost is not just the lost production. It is the damaged equipment, the unplanned downtime, the safety incident report, the regulatory exposure, and the days of recovery before the rig is back to drilling.
Why batteries and supercapacitors are excluded from offshore drilling
Hazardous-area classification is the reason. An offshore drilling platform handles hydrocarbons by definition, which means most of the deck and process areas are classified ATEX Zone 1, Zone 2, or IECEx equivalents. Any equipment installed in those zones must be certified to operate without acting as an ignition source.
Lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitor banks both contain flammable electrolyte and can fail through thermal runaway. Class societies, drilling contractors, and operators treat this as a hard exclusion. There is no fire brigade coming for an offshore fire, and the risk insurers price accordingly.
Diesel rotary UPS solves the safety problem but introduces a different one: response time. Diesel generators take seconds to respond and cannot catch the millisecond-scale voltage drops that damage the equipment.
A flywheel sits in the gap. No chemistry. No flame propagation path. No replacement cycle. Response time inside 10 milliseconds, sustained for minutes if needed.
How the Teraloop flywheel works on an offshore platform
The PowerLoop 250 ships in an ISO standard intermodal container that drops onto the deck of a platform with no civil work. The container connects to the platform's low-voltage bus through standard switchgear. From that point of connection it operates in three modes in parallel:
Voltage support
When grid voltage drops, the flywheel injects reactive current into the bus within 10 milliseconds to hold the voltage above the trip threshold of critical motors. This is the highest-priority mode.
Ride-through
When a transient outage hits, the flywheel feeds the platform's critical loads for seconds to minutes while generators catch up or backup synchronises.
Peak shaving
Between events, the flywheel absorbs and releases energy on second-to-minute timescales to flatten the platform's load profile and reduce generator wear.
Specs that matter the most
How does it compare with other solutions
| Teraloop flywheel | Battery (Li-ion) | Supercapacitor | Diesel rotary UPS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Response time | < 10 ms | Seconds | Milliseconds | Seconds |
| Duration | Seconds to minutes | Hours | Sub-second to seconds | Hours |
| ATEX / EX zone install | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Fire risk on platform | None | Real (thermal runaway) | Real (electrolyte) | Real (fuel) |
| Footprint | One ISO container | Larger, plus exclusion zone | Larger for same power | Container plus fuel |
| Replacement cycle | None in 25 years | 5 to 10 years | 5 to 10 years | Wears with use |
| Maintenance | Minimal, no consumables | BMS, replacement | Capacitor replacement | Diesel service, oil |
Frequently asked questions
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