Beacon Power Corp. has announced that a 1-MW Smart Energy Matrix has been operating at more than 90% average availability in ISO New England’s Alternative Technologies Pilot Program since Jan. 1, 2009. Beacon expects to improve the performance of the system by making minor changes that will allow it to respond even better to the ISO New England control signal.

The control signaling employed by the New York and California ISOs to operate Beacon’s flywheels in the company’s 2006-2007 technology demonstration programs operated the systems at multiple levels over their entire performance range. This control method required the flywheels to respond proportionally to variable imbalances between electricity supply and demand. In contrast, ISO New England has been operating Beacon’s system using a non-proportional, trinary signal. The trinary control method requires the system to be in one of three states – either fully charging, neutral, or fully discharging. Beacon has found that the trinary method of operation does not fully use the performance capabilities of the flywheel system, and it causes the flywheels to operate at a higher temperature than the proportional control method. To compensate for ISO New England’s current control method, the 1-MW system has occasionally been operated at a slightly lower overall output, pending a refinement of the motor-generator design. This design improvement is now being implemented.

The deployment of two additional megawatts of regulation capacity at Beacon’s Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, headquarters has been slowed by severe winter weather and the analysis and refinement of the motor-generator as described above. Beacon expects that this additional 2 MW of capacity will be generating revenue on the ISO New England grid by the end of the first quarter of 2009, rather than the end of 2008 as originally targeted. This will bring the total capacity at the Tyngsboro site to 3 MW.

The fourth and fifth megawatts of capacity originally planned for the ISO New England Pilot Program will instead be deployed to Beacon’s site in Stephentown, New York, and to a second site in either the PJM Interconnection or the Midwest ISO. This will allow Beacon to gain bidding and operations experience in two additional regulation markets and broader visibility as a regulation service provider. The New York system will be interconnected to NYSEG, a major state utility with which Beacon has already entered into an interconnection agreement. The New York ISO is expected to open the market for energy storage-based regulation services by mid-2009.