Heat and Energy Efficiency News
$43m federal loan guarantee for 20MW flywheel storage project
The Stephentown flywheel plant is already under construction
The Stephentown flywheel plant is already under construction
Financing for a 20-megawatt energy storage project in New York State has been agreed, with the US Department of Energy providing a $43 million loan guarantee.
Massachusetts company Beacon Power Corporation is building a flywheel energy storage plant in Stephentown, New York.
The facility will be the first of its kind in the world, able to provide around 10% of the frequency regulation needed to balance the New York power grid on a typical day, replacing fossil fuel-powered capacity.
It should also help as regulation requirements grow with more renewable energy facilities connected up to the grid.
The DOE arranged the project’s loan via the US Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank, which will cover 62.5% of the project’s total $69 million cost.
Construction is already underway, with expectations that the facility will be fully energized by the end of the first quarter of 2011.
“Breakthrough”
Bill Capp, Beacon president and CEO, said: “We believe that there is no better way to provide efficient, grid-scale frequency regulation than our flywheel systems, and we’re grateful to DOE, through the Loan Programs Office, for its continued strong support and validation of this breakthrough technology.”
Flywheel technology stores energy in its kinetic (motion) form. It involves use of a rotor (or flywheel) usually contained within a vacuum, where electricity is used to spin the rotor to a very high speed when there is too much power in the grid.
Once spinning at several thousand rotations per minute, the flywheel’s energy can then be extracted again to supply electricity when there is not enough power in the grid.
Flywheel plants can act as “shock absorbers” for the grid, which means they can be used to support intermittent sources of power like wind farms and solar facilities.
Beacon Power is also developing two more similar flywheel storage plants, including another 20MW facility in Glenville, New York, which is currently awaiting another DOE loan guarantee.
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