Greentech Media has an article on a flywheel energy storage company that are building systems for Canadian utilities - Hydro One Chooses a Flywheel for Wind Balancing.

“Utilities are very familiar with spinning steel,” said Cam Carver, CEO of Temporal Power, a Canadian startup with an all-steel flywheel technology. The Ontario-based company is working with Hydro One to provide up to ten 500-kilowatt flywheels for frequency regulation on a feeder that is connected to two 10-megawatt wind farms in southwest Ontario.

Frequency regulation is the sweet spot for flywheel technology, which can quickly respond to the fluctuations on the grid to provide balancing services. Carver said that Temporal’s technology is ideal for providing about three minutes to fifteen minutes of storage. ...

The result is that it can run for up to six minutes at its full rate of power and can store up to 50 times more energy. The flywheels can be scaled to provide anywhere from about 2 megawatts to 100 megawatts. “It’s bigger, simpler, more powerful -- and it’s cheaper,” said Carver. “We’re advancing it, but we’re also making it simpler.”

Hydro One is using 500-kilowatt units, which are under construction now. The flywheels can be matched with motors of various sizes, for a rated power mode of anywhere from 100 kilowatt-hours to 500 kilowatt-hours.

Clean Break has a look at a flywheel based energy storage system from a Canadian startup - Temporal Power brings new spin to flywheel energy storage.

A Burlington, Ontario-based startup called Temporal Power is the focus of my Clean Break column in today’s Toronto Star. Temporal has designed a stationary flywheel energy storage system that it claims can dramatically outperform the next-best system on the market, which you might say comes from Mass.-based Beacon Power. The company has filed patents on the system but they have yet to become public — likely in a few months. Until then, the company is keeping quiet about how it achieves its claimed performance, and I don’t blame them given the competitive pressures. The story behind how the company came about, however, is interesting. And if Temporal can convincingly demonstrate what it claims, it could prove a breakthrough for economical grid-scale energy storage.

For a good primer and innovation update on flywheel energy storage systems, check out this recent story in the Washington Post. My column also explains the basics of how the systems work and the challenges of making them efficient and economical.

So what does Temporal claim? The company says it has designed a system with zero parasitic losses and extremely low friction using relatively simple and easily available components. It uses permanent magnets, not electromagnets, but the overall integration of components is largely a mystery — for now. It claims its flywheel will lose less than 5 per cent of its energy after up to 10 hours of spinning, making it ideal for storing energy from a wind farm in the evening and dispatching it hours later when the power is needed. This is a departure for flywheel systems, which are typically used for short-term energy backup and services such as grid regulation.

The company plans to standardize on 50-kilowatt-hour units, double the size of the main Beacon model, and these systems could be grouped together to achieve a larger scale of energy storage. It already has a working 20-kilowatt-hour prototype. Its first demonstration is likely to be a 10-flywheel project deployed in Hydro One’s distribution network, where the technology will absorb fluctuations from nearby wind turbines in an area of the grid that has strained capacity.

CNet has an article on funding for Beacon Power's energy storage technology - Flywheel power grid storage project gets DOE loan.

Beacon Power on Monday said it has closed a $43 million loan guarantee with the Department of Energy for a project to use flywheels to buffer 20 megawatts of power on the grid.

The loan covers 62.5 percent of the estimated $69 million needed to construct the flywheel storage plant in Stephentown, N.Y. The New York Energy Research and Development Authority is also providing $2 million in funding for the plant which is now under construction.

Once done, Beacon Power said that the plant will be the only one of its kind in the world. Rather than use a large battery, it will use a network of 200 flywheels to store electricity from the grid as kinetic energy and disperse it in quick bursts of up to 15 minutes.

Right now, grid operators typically use natural gas power plants to maintain a balance between supply and demand and keep a steady frequency of 60 cycles per second. The Stephentown project, expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter next year, will be able to provide 10 percent of the frequency regulation services in New York needed on a typical day.

The project is significant step up for the technology, which so far has been used in smaller-scale installation of about one megawatt of power.

The New York storage installation paves the way for higher penetration of solar and wind power generation. Since they are variable sources of power, utilities are looking at different forms of grid storage to smooth out the delivery of power from renewable sources.

SunPower has announced it has completed a 505-kilowatt solar power installation for Horizon Power at two sites (Marble Bar and Nullagine) in the east Pilbara region of Western Australia. The system is the largest solar tracking system in Australia and powers the world's first hybrid solar-diesel power stations. The plant will generate around 1,048 megawatt hours of solar energy per year.

The T20 Tracker system used follows the sun's movement during the day, increasing sunlight capture by up to 30 percent over conventional systems and significantly reducing land use requirements.

According to The Climate Spectator, the plant employs flywheel technology developed by PowerCorp that is used to smooth the energy from the solar panels and stabilise power quality between the diesel power station and the solar farm.

Renewable Energy World has a report on reasonably large scale energy storage using flywheels - Beacon Power Tests Megawatt of Flywheel Storage . The device can pump out 1 MW for 15 minutes.

Beacon Power Corporation, a company that designs and develops products and services to support electricity grid operation, announced that it has built and tested an integrated matrix of ten high-power flywheels that when operated together can absorb and supply a full megawatt (MW) of electricity. The system, located in Beacon's headquarters, will be the first of up to 5 MW of flywheel-based regulation capability that will be produced this year and commercially deployed to generate revenues from the provision of regulation services.

Until now, Beacon had been building and running individual flywheels in preparation for its first full megawatt implementation. Based on internal testing of an integrated matrix of ten flywheels, the company said that its one-megawatt Smart Energy Matrix can ramp up and down to absorb and supply a full megawatt of power.

Over the next few weeks, Beacon will begin system testing in conjunction with ISO New England, during which time the flywheel matrix will respond to actual ISO test signals to absorb and supply power. This plan will allow the company to meet its schedule to interconnect live to the grid and to begin performing frequency regulation services under an ISO New England Alternative Technologies Pilot Program scheduled to start on November 18.