Fly(wheel) Me to the Moon

September 24, 2008

Last week at MIT, FERC Commissioner Jon Wellinghoff briefed a large group on FERC's role in the Federal government's energy regulation and energy security roles. One of the new companies he mentioned during the course of his presentation was Massachusetts-based flywheel storage innovator Beacon Power. 

This technology has me pretty excited - sort of like capturing a jet plane in a bottle. Spinning in a vacuum at 16,000 rpms (about twice the speed of sound on the surface), flywheels are kinetic challengers to the chemical energy storage solutions we call batteries. You may have heard of them before in lower power situations, such as serving as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) for medical or data-center applications. Now Beacon is designing and beginning to test large arrays of flywheels, and the potential for service regulation and renewable energy storage is great. Read more about it here.

Image courtesy of Beacon Power, Inc.