Flywheel

John Petersen With only a couple trading days left in 2009, this is as good a time as any for a performance review. The predictions I made at this time last year were pretty solid with an 80% accuracy rate on price direction. For the year, a $1,000 investment in each of my green star companies would have yielded a portfolio appreciation of 67%, which handily beat the broader market indices. That being said, my star and caution ratings were a good deal less prescient because I seriously underestimated the potential of both Maxwell Technologies (MXWL) and Active...

10.08.09 ACPW John Petersen This morning I awoke to a comment from Seeking Alpha contributor Michael Eisenberg who asked me to lay out my core thesis on why Active Power, Inc. (ACPW) merits attention from investors who are interested in the energy storage sector. While Altenergystocks and Seeking Alpha don't generally like to publish articles about companies that trade for under a dollar, I believe Active Power merits an exception to the general policies. As regular readers know, I've been a small company securities lawyer for almost...

In June, I wrote how intermittent power sources such as photovoltaics and wind would have to compete with baseload technologies such as IGCC "Clean Coal" and nuclear for capacity on the grid.  The key problem is that neither baseload technologies nor intermittent technologies are able to match themselves to the fluctuations of demand.  This creates a need for technologies which can fill the varying gaps between supply from these sources, and normal energy use.  From the comments, it seems like I was not completely clear how intermittent and baseload power cause problems for each other, so I will start...

Beacon Power Corp (BCON) announced that yesterday it received from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) an executed contract between Beacon Power and NYSERDA under a joint initiative between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Storage Research Program and NYSERDA, to demonstrate an advanced energy storage solution for frequency regulation and grid stability in New York State. The contract is expected to produce approximately $645,000 of revenue, nearly all of it in 2005. The stock is trading up over 20% today on this news.

America’s electric power grid is subject to immense inefficiencies that arise from the interplay between centralized power generation, local power consumption and on demand utility service. To put things into a broad perspective, the nameplate capacity of U.S. generating facilities is about 1 million Megawatts (MW), so if all of our power plants ran 24/7 we would have a theoretical annual generating capacity of 8.7 billion Megawatt-hours (MWh). Since demand for electricity fluctuates on both a daily and seasonal basis, total electric power generation in 2007 was only 4.2 billion MWh, or less than 50% of nameplate...

John Petersen The next couple months are shaping up as a time of extraordinary change in the energy storage sector. Events that will drive the change include: Press reports indicate that the Department of Energy will be ready to announce it's preliminary decisions on the allocation of $2 billion in ARRA battery manufacturing grants sometime this week; We've seen numerous reports on automaker's plans to begin manufacturing PHEVs and EVs in limited volumes for testing and demonstration purposes; New tailpipe emission standards in Europe and accelerated CAFE standards...

Active Power Inc (ACPW) announced an order from Eaton Powerware for twelve 500 kW DC flywheel systems. These units will ship in the first half of 2006 and be used to upgrade the power infrastructure of an existing data center in the United States.

John Petersen The next few days are going to be a very exciting time in the energy storage and electric vehicle sectors because the Obama Administration is preparing to announce a series of major ATVM Loan and ARRA Battery Manufacturing Grant awards. President Obama will be in Elkhart, Indiana where he will presumably announce an ATVM loan to Navistar (NAV) and may announce some additional ATVM loans or ARRA battery grants. Vice President Biden will be in Detroit where he is scheduled to announce one or more ARRA battery grants and perhaps some ATVM Loans. Secretary...

The market for grid frequency regulation services open to new service providers in the United States in 2004 was valued at nearly $360 million - and is expected to increase in 2005 - according to a Technology Brief issued today by Ardour Capital Investments, LLC. Frequency regulation is the target market for Beacon Power Corp (BCON) Smart Energy Matrix flywheel energy storage system, two demonstration systems of which are being built under contract to the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The Technology Brief is available online at www.ardourcapital.com, under...

Active Power Inc (ACPW) announced the shipment of its first CleanSource® XR evaluation unit to one of the largest producers of electricity in the United States. The CleanSource XR unit will be tested under a variety of conditions for both backup power and load-shifting applications. CleanSource XR stores energy in the form of heat and compressed air. When power is needed, the compressed air is routed through a thermal storage unit to acquire heat energy. The heated air spins a simple turbine-alternator to produce 5 to 85 kW of electric power for up to several hours. Unlike commonly...