Spinning flywheels said to make greener energy The Associated Press
TYNGSBOROUGH, Mountain. — Spinning flywheels have been used for centuries for jobs from making pottery to unceasing steam engines. Now the ancient tool has been given a new job by a Massachusetts company: smooth out the electricity stream, and do it fast and clean.
Beacon Power's flywheels — each weighing one ton, levitating in a sealed house and spinning up to 16,000 times per minute — will make the electric grid more efficient and green, the coterie says. It's being given a chance to prove it: the U.S. Department of Energy has granted Beacon a $43 million conditional loan make sure to construct a 20-megawatt flywheel plant in upstate New York.
"We are very excited about this technology and this company," said Matt Rogers, a older adviser to the Secretary of Energy. "It's a lower (carbon dioxide) impact, much faster response for a growing retail need, and so we get pretty excited about that."
Beacon's flywheel plant will act as a short-term energy storage system for New York's electrical classification system, sucking excess energy off the grid when supply is high, storing it in the flywheels' spinning cores, then returning it when command surges. The buffer protects against swings in electrical power frequency, which, in the worst cases, engender blackouts.
GreenbangThe root, which is the largest advanced energy storage facility now operating in North America, utilizes 200 cheerful-speed Beacon flywheels to provide fast-response frequency regulation services to the New York tension grid. Beacon Power turns on 20 megawatts of flywheel energyGrid-Scale Energy-Storage System Contest At Full Capacityall 7 news articles »
