revised 5/17/2010
by David Flint
A crew from LeChase Construction Services, LLC out of Schenectady resumed work this month at the site on Grange Hall Road in Stephentown where the Beacon Power company is building the world’s first full-scale flywheel-based frequency regulation plant. Having completed the basic site work that they started last December. LeChase is now beginning to construct the 20 pods, each of which will contain ten flywheels each one spinning at more than 20,000 16,000 rpm in a vacuum, designed to quickly charge and discharge power to and from the grid and keep it in balance.
Harry Fairbrother, Senior Manufacturing Engineer at Beacon, is overseeing the work and is pleased with the way the project is going so far. He expects that it will take about one year to complete the construction of all 20 pods, but they will be hooked up in stages to the grid. Beacon Communications Director Gene Hunt said the plan is to have four pods installed and connected to the grid by the end of this year, each pod producing one megawatt. The full 20 megawatts should be running by the end of March, 2011. Hunt said Beacon’s manufacturing plant in Tyngsboro, MA is now ramping up to full production of flywheel systems.
