A synchronous condenser isn't going to store much power, but it does have inertia, which will keep it from slowing down immediately.
The power factor control in a synchronous condenser comes from the voltage regulator. It varies the field current to vary the output voltage. Maybe they don't need that so they are using a cheaper excitation system which isn't capable of voltage control, which is why they call it a flywheel rather than a synchronous condenser.
The other benefit of synchronous condensers is that they contribute fault current. It's hard to protect systems with low fault current because faults can look like loads; this device is probably doing that as well.

I was at Agate too, came from northern Minnesota and spent the weekend in Rapid City. We got there at sunrise and left quickly after totality to get ahead of the crowd. I'm wondering where you got the number 11,000. That number seems about right, I just hadn't seen any official count.

Anytime you describe yourself as "kickass," you come off as a jerk. Then you demand to work remotely. Surely there are people out there with adequate skills, who aren't jerks and will show up at the office once in a while.

Redundancy is good. I brought my passport to the PE exam so I'd have identification in case I lost my wallet. I got my calculator at Goodwill for 50 cents. It had some broken LCD segments. I had a backup, but I never bothered to take it out of the packaging. The redundancy comes from doing the math on paper, and doing the math with a calculator and comparing. And it comes from doing the problems more than once. Don't spend too much time on a hard problem. And don't spend too little time on a problem that looks easy. And be sure to check that your answers in the test book get transfer correctly to the answer sheet.

“It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.”

This doesn't sound like a Windows BSOD at all. I'm not sure what DCS (distributed control system) they were using, but in my experience with Foxboro I/A is that when things turn blue it mean's there's no data coming in. The term I usually hear is "Smurfed" because somebody thought the color (cyan) looked like a Smurf.

This would possibly be due to an analog input signal that fell out of the 4-20mA range, or a loss of communications within the DCS or from an outside controller.

It releases the carbon that the tree had already taken out of the atmosphere, and the tree that grows in its place will recapture. So the net is zero emission.

As said in great grandparent post, compressed air and hydrogen are energy storage mediums. Wood is the same thing. Trees use solar energy to convert CO2 into carbon. When you burn the wood, you put the CO2 back into the air and get the energy back as heat.

It doesn't matter if we burn the wood for something useful, the trees dies and rots, or the tree is burned in a forest fire: at some point the carbon is coming back out of that tree.

Didn't you ever see Raising Arizona? Nick Cage served a lot of time in the Maricopa County Correctional Facility for Men. He was what you call, a repeat offender. Clearly it's not working.

My theory is that Dick Cheney died of a heart attack in 2002. He stopped breathing, but his replacement robot kept right on being evil.