NorthWestern to have energy storage system
The Tyngsborough-based company, a maker of “flywheel” power storage systems, said it will build a 1-megawatt storage system for NorthWestern Energy in Montana, expected to be operational by the end of the year.
The flywheel systems provide frequency regulation service, which helps to stabilize the electric grid by balancing power supply levels during moment-to-moment variations in demand.
Beacon Power has built its other energy storage facilities for grid operators in New York and Massachusetts. The Montana project is “the first tangible result of the second part of our business model, the sale or lease of plants and systems to vertically integrated utilities, i.e., those that must self-provide frequency regulation,” Beacon spokesman Gene Hunt wrote in an email.
NorthWestern Energy will lease the system from Beacon for $500,000 for the first 15 months and for the same amount for future 15-month terms. NorthWestern also has the option to buy the facility for $4 million at any point, Beacon said.
The facility will be located on the site of the Mill Creek Generating Station, a gas-fired regulating reserve plant owned by NorthWestern Energy in Anaconda, Mont.
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OTTAWA - The city of Ottawa is looking to designate five hydro substations built nearly a century ago as heritage structures, a move intended to protect the architectural history of Ottawa's earliest forays into the electricity business.
All five buildings are still used by Hydro Ottawa to reduce the voltage coming from transmission lines before the electricity is transmitted to homes and businesses.
Electricity came to Ottawa in 1882 when two carbon lamps were installed on LeBreton Flats, heritage planner Anne Fitzpatrick told the city's built heritage subcommittee on Tuesday. It became a lucrative business, and soon a privately owned monopoly.
In 1905,…
