News, Trends & Analysis
Posts tagged Beacon Power
Energy Storage Needs Better Utility Policy, Language, Culture to Succeed
Jul 28th
ERIC WESOFF: JULY 28, 2010
How about we start by calling storage, storage and a battery, a battery?
Utility-scale energy storage in the field today is limited to pumped hydro, a few large deployments using compressed air energy storage (CAES), hundreds of megawatts of sodium sulphur (NaS) batteries, mostly in Japan, and some experiments with banks of lithium-ion batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries and regenerative fuel cells (flow batteries). Greentech Media has long covered the energy storage market with technologies that include:
- Batteries (Li-ion, NiMh, Zinc Air, NaS, etc.)
- Flow Batteries
- Flywheels
- Phase-change materials
- Ammonia
- Thermal Storage as heat or ice
- Hydrogen systems
- Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)
- Pumped Hydro
- Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES)
- Ultracapacitors
- Using off-peak wind energy to synthesize fuels More >
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Is Energy Storage a Product or Service?
Mar 10th
MICHAEL KANELLOS 03 08 10
Why sell utilities the cow when they can get the electricity for a fee?
Energy storage companies generally get their revenue by selling products.
But they might do better if they position themselves as mini-utilities.
To overcome some of the economic realities of the energy market and to better highlight some of the advantages of storage systems, makers of large-scale batteries, flywheels and other types of equipment may start to position themselves as power providers or service providers instead of manufacturers.
Take Beacon Power, for example. The Tyngsboro, Mass.-based company originally planned to sell its flywheels as a pieces of equipment to utilities to More >
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...
Loading ...
