Peak power reduction and energy efficiency improvement with the superconducting flywheel energy storage in electric railway system

•It is important to develop power and energy management system to save operating cost.•An 100 kWh of SFES is effective to decrease peak power and energy consumption.•Operation cost saving can be achieved using superconducting flywheel energy storage.

This paper proposes an application of the 100 kWh superconducting flywheel energy storage systems to reduce the peak power of the electric railway system. The electric railway systems have high-power characteristics and large amount of regenerative energy during vehicles’ braking. The high-power characteristic makes operating cost high as the system should guarantee the secure capacity of electrical equipment and the low utilization rate of regenerative energy limits the significant energy efficiency improvement. In this paper, it had been proved that the peak power reduction and energy efficiency improvement can be achieved by using 100 kWh superconducting flywheel energy storage systems with the optimally controlled charging or discharging operations. Also, economic benefits had been assessed.