Back in the day I wrote about Beacon Power several times, although all the stories disappeared when the Nashua Telegraph’s new owners took over and swapped servers. The Massachusetts company was building flywheels: large heavy spinning disks to store and release power into the grid. It was a cool technology that seemed promising with two multi-megawatt plants operating. Then Beacon went under and flywheels mostly disappeared.
Michael Barnard at CleanTechnica has a long analysis of why flywheels haven’t taken off for energy storage or grid stability.
They are mechanically elegant, grounded in physics everyone understands, and they solve a real problem in principle. … Flywheels did not lose to one rival. They lost to a swarm of rivals, each better suited to a specific service.
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