Hazle Spindle (20 MW Flywheel Frequency Regulation Plant) - Formerly Beacon Power
August 25, 2017
minute read time
The project objective was to design, build, and operate a flywheel energy storage frequency regulation plant at the Humboldt Industrial Park in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. The plant was to provide frequency regulation services to grid operator PJM Interconnection. The Beacon Power technology uses flywheels to recycle energy from the grid in response to changes in demand and grid frequency. When generated power exceeds load, the flywheels store the excess energy. When load increases, the flywheels return the energy to the grid. The flywheel system can respond nearly instantaneously to an independent system operator’s control signal at a rate 100 times faster than traditional generation resources. The system does not burn fuel and has zero direct emissions. The Beacon Gen4 flywheel is designed to provide 100 kW of output and store 25 kWh of energy. Two hundred flywheels were to be connected in parallel to provide 20 MW in capacity and can fully respond in less than 4 seconds. The plant can operate at 100% Depth of Discharge with no energy degradation over time and can do so for over 150,000 full charge/discharge cycles. The flywheels are built to last 20 years or more. Virtually no maintenance is required in the mechanical portion of the flywheel system. Flywheel technology has been successfully tested on live grids at scale power in New York and California. The technology achieved system availability of over 97 percent, higher than the average for conventional generators performing frequency regulation. It has been deployed at multi-megawatt scale under New England’s Alterative Technologies pilot program, and a 20 MW plant in New York Independent System Operator (ISO) territory in Stephentown NY.