Oil and gas onshore drilling
Voltage drops in milliseconds. A flywheel catches them before they reach the pumps, without the chemistry that EX zones do not allow.
What a voltage drop actually does to a drilling site
An onshore drilling site runs dozens of large rotating loads at the same time: mud pumps, top-drive motors, draw works, cementing pumps, separator pumps, gas handling. Each one draws hundreds of kilowatts to multi-megawatts. The site'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 site, 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, and the days of recovery before the rig is back to drilling.
Generators respond in seconds. The damage happens in the first 100 milliseconds.
Why batteries and supercapacitors are excluded
Onshore drilling sites handle hydrocarbons, which means most of the drilling area is 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. Operators, drilling contractors, and fire brigades treat this as a hard exclusion: chemistry is not permitted in EX-classified zones.
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 a Teraloop flywheel works on a drilling site
A Power Loop 250 ships in an ISO standard intermodal container that drops onto the site with no civil work. The container connects to the site'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. Highest-priority mode.
Ride-through
When a transient outage hits, the flywheel feeds the site'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 load profile and reduce generator wear.
Why a flywheel here
Faster than the failure
Sub-10 millisecond response holds the voltage above the trip threshold of pumps and motors before damage starts.
Compatible with EX zones
No flammable electrolyte, no thermal runaway path. The flywheel does not break the hazardous-area classification of the site.
Built for the conditions
Containerised, indoor or outdoor, in dust or in heat. Designed for a 25-year operating life with no replacement cycle.
Tell us about your site.
Share the bus configuration and the voltage events you have been seeing. Our engineering team will come back with a sizing and a starting estimate.