DoE swoops in with flywheel funding for Beacon Power

Flywheel energy storage specialist Beacon Power Corporation last week announced that it has been awarded $43m (£26.6m) in loan guarantees by the Department of Energy (DoE) to help complete a storage project in New York state.

Beacon Power's storage plant, which will have a 20MW capacity, is designed to solve the problem of energy regulation on electrical grids. Grids must maintain their frequency as close to 60Hz as possible, but variations in supply and demand mean that utilities have to vary their production up and down within a percentage point of total capacity.

Beacon's plant would use zero-emission flywheel technology to store excess energy and deliver it back to the grid when needed. It would operate 200 flywheels in parallel.

Beacon's flywheel technology uses a metal hub and shaft attached to a rotor. When it needs to absorb electricity from the grid, it uses it to make the flywheel spin faster. When the grid needs more electricity, the flywheel can be slowed down, transferring kinetic energy back to the grid. The flywheels are designed to have a minimum 20-year lifetime, with zero maintenance, says the firm.

Flywheels and other forms of energy storage technologies have attracted increased investor and political interest in the past few years as energy firms look for ways to manage the intermittent energy that will be provided by renewable technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels.

The company said that the money, to be provided by the US Treasury's Federal Financing Bank, will cover 62.5 per cent of the Stephenstown, NY plant's $69m project cost.

The DoE loan guarantee programme was created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It lets the department loan money to companies that avoid air pollutants and new improved technologies for energy storage and production.