Beacon Power Corporation has announced that it has installed a flywheel energy storage system at a wind farm in Tehachapi, California. The system is part of a wind power/flywheel demonstration project being carried out for the California Energy Commission.
The primary goal of the project is to demonstrate that advanced control
technology with energy storage can help expand the delivery of wind
energy by effectively increasing the capacity of constrained
transmission facilities in the area. Under the scope of this project the
Smart Energy™ 25 flywheel will normally provide frequency regulation.
However, during times when the local sub-transmission line becomes
constrained due to lack of reactive power or thermal overload,
intelligent agents will override the regulation function and direct the
flywheel to take action that in a full-scale commercial system would
help alleviate the constraint. Once the constraint is resolved, the
system will return to its primary function of performing frequency
regulation.
