If you attend lots of energy seminars and conferences and speeches -- and yes, I do -- you start to hear a common refrain and it goes something like this: Energy storage is the missing link for renewable energy.  Sometimes the word “holy grail??? will be substituted for “missing link.???  (Note that attached picture is a holy hand grenade, not grail.) Wind turbines are useful only when the wind blows and photovoltaic panels work only when the sun is shining.  Therefore these renewable energy sources are not considered “dispatchable??? and require a measure of dispatchable backup (typically in the form of a non-renewable source such as natural gas). “We can make intermittent sources of renewable energy into dispatchable power.??? These are the fighting words of Bill Gray, the CEO of Velkess, a kinetic energy storage system startup.  He is trying to deliver the holy grail of renewable energy -- cheap, effective energy storage. Up until now the most efficient energy storage technologies have been:

• Pumping water up a hill

• Heating a rock

All technologies available to The Flinstones. Flywheels from companies like Active Power, Beacon Power and Pentadyne Power are typically built from carbon fiber or high tensile steel.  The flywheel is basically a large mass spinning on a non-contact magnetic bearing,   Because of high costs they are used in frequency regulation or UPS applications, not actual utility-scale MW-size energy storage. Velkess has a new type of flywheel technology, which uses a different set of materials and engineering principles than traditional flywheels.  Mr. Gray was unwilling to disclose the details. But he did claim that the cost of his solution was ten times less than the current $3.00 per Watt cost of storage.  And he did volunteer that the technology has been demonstrated, and uses a flexible rather than a rigid body -- “like a cowboy’s lasso.??? In Gray's words, "Energy storage is a crucial functionality to a clean energy future -- and this space deserves more thought and review.??? Velkess will be competing not only against other flywheel companies but against other storage technologies like flow batteries, compressed air storage, NaS batteries, and pumped hydro.