Flywheel Developer Awarded ARPA-E Contract

(Brookhaven National Lab)

Beacon Power Corporation, a developer of energy storage systems and services in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) to develop components of a more advanced flywheel energy storage system over a two-year period.

Beacon Power says the contract is valued at $2.8 million. ARPA-E grant recipients share a portion of the program cost, and Beacon will contribute $560,000, or 20% of that $2.8 million.

Flywheels provide power companies a way of storing energy from intermittent sources, such as wind or solar, and releasing the energy in a smooth flow as required by current grid technology, a process called frequency regulation. The goal of the project according to Beacon Power, is to store four times the energy at one-eighth the cost per kilowatt-hour of its current Smart Energy 25 (Gen 4) flywheel system. Gen 4 flywheels are now in production and being deployed on the grid to provide frequency regulation service.

Beacon expects the ARPA-E-funded flywheel system, if carried through to a commercial product, to be suitable for a variety of new applications. One such application of particular interest to Department of Energy is to provide a greater ramping and load-balancing resource for intermittent renewable energy assets, and thereby reduce the amount of fossil-based backup power that might be used to provide the same effect. This feature is expected to significantly encourage renewable power generation.