Seeking to Innovate?

Accelerate your company's innovation capacity
[CONTACT US]

INNOVATION RESOURCES

Beacon Power Develops Next Generation Flywheel

Breakthrough:
Beacon Power is leading a team in developing a next generation flywheel energy-storage module that stores four times the energy at 1/8 the cost-per-energy of the lowest cost state-of-the-art flywheels.

Business:
Beacon Power Corporation, United States

The Story:

The proposed 100kW, 100kWh system will use a "flying ring:" a lightweight hoop of co-mingled fiber composite with bonded magnetic materials mounted on the structure. This configuration eliminates the central shaft and hub allowing full utilization of the composite properties, thereby reducing cost and increasing energy density to 76Wh/kg.

This design will be capable of very high cycling (>40,000 full charge/discharge cycles) and will have a 20 year life, making it ideal to simultaneously address multiple grid-scale energy storage applications, including frequency regulation as well as emerging for ramping power to firm intermittent renewable generation.

In 2008, they completed work under Phase I of a planned multi-phase R&D project with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Bonneville Power Administration, the California ISO, and the California Energy Commission. The goals of the project include developing principles, algorithms, market integration rules, and a functional design and specification for an energy storage and control system that has the potential to help the Bonneville Power Administration and the California ISO better cope with wind generation intermittency and unexpected fast ramps from the deployment of new wind resources.

A system resulting from this project, if deployed, would be expected to accomplish these goals by recycling excess energy, controlling dispatchable load and distributed generation, and managing inter-area exchanges of excess energy between the Bonneville Power Administration and California ISO Control Areas. The technical approach includes coordinating and co-optimizing large hydro facilities with flywheel or other energy storage facilities. Another goal of the project is to complete a cost-benefit analysis and develop a commercial business model that can justify the investment in a large-scale multi-megawatt system.

Phase I is completed and results are promising. Because flywheel storage is capable of compensating for the inaccuracies caused by response delay, dead zone, and deviation characteristics of the hydro power plant, simulation showed that the aggregated hydro power plant and flywheel storage plant could provide a faster and more accurate regulation service than the hydro plant alone.

Simulation results clearly seemed to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed Wide Area Energy Management and Energy Storage system, and it was concluded that a total system of hydro resources and flywheels could be highly effective in mitigating the effects of intermittent wind resources in BPA's and CAISO's service territories. Phase II goals include providing numerical factors needed for the design of the system architecture and completion of a design specification for such a system. Phase II will involve the use of one 100 kW, 25 kWh Smart Energy 25 flywheel. Deployment of a full scale system could involve many megawatts of flywheel energy storage capacity.

[BEACONPOWER.COM]

[NEXT STORY]

IdeaConnection: What Can we Solve for You?

Regulating_Resources_with_Large_Scale_Wind_Power-1.pdf

Become a
Paid Problem Solver