Beacon Power, Backed by U.S. Loan Guarantees, Files Bankruptcy

Source: Business Week

October 31, 2011, 12:30 AM EDT
By Dawn McCarty

Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Beacon Power Corp., an energy-storage company that received $43 million in backing from the U.S. program that supported failed solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC, filed for bankruptcy after struggling to raise private financing.

The money-losing company, which makes flywheels that manage energy moving through a power grid, had sought to avoid the fate of Solyndra, which entered bankruptcy last month after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from a U.S. Energy Department program designed to spur alternative energy development. Beacon faced delisting of its shares by the Nasdaq Stock Market and warned in an Aug. 9 regulatory filing that it might not remain a “going concern.”

“The current economic and political climate, the financing terms mandated by DOE, and Beacon’s recent delisting notice from Nasdaq have together severely restricted Beacon’s access to additional investments through the equity markets,” Chief Executive Officer F. William Capp said in papers filed yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.
....

Beacon’s first grid-scale plant, with 200 flywheels, began operating in January. The 20-megawatt facility in Stephentown, New York, was funded using the $43 million Energy Department loan guarantee issued in August 2010. About $39.1 million is currently due under the loan, Capp said.


Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-31/beacon-power-backed-by-u-s-loan-guarantees-files-bankruptcy.html#0_undefined,0_

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There have been other threads at DU about Beacon Power. For instance:

Beacon Power initiates 20MW New York flywheel plant

Big Oil has the power & money to work behind the scenes to kibosh anything. Their lack of ethics helps.

In the 1970s Big Oil bought fledgling solar power companies and promptly stopped any R&D, if not shutdown the whole company. Ford bought a Norwegian electric car company & then promptly shut it down a few years ago.

The 1% rule the world :-(

oodles of money producing/storing energy.

Kind of a more subtle form of disaster capitalism.

I remember after the oil embargo of the early 1970s, Detroit "went small" with car design. I remember a weekly news magazine (Newsweek?) had a small car drawing on its cover with the words, "Detroit Thinks Small." I thought, "It's about time." It was obvious we couldn't continue producing and driving gas guzzlers. Well, during the following decades we saw the production of the minivan, then the SUI, then the big pickup trucks, then the monster SUVs, then the monster pickup trucks, then the Hummer(!!!), and I thought, "What the Hell are we doing?!!" We were back to producing and driving gas guzzlers that made anything manufactured before the 1970s oil embargo look puny by comparison!

We are our own worst enemy...

like the Vega, the Monza, and the Chevette, to farming out small-car production to other companies because it "wasn't profitable enough". The successor to the Chevette, the Chevy Sprint, was actually a slightly modified Suzuki Cultus. The Sprint wasn't a bad little car, though, and could get up to 50 mpg on the highway.

has always come down to 4 types of opposition: oil, coal, nukes and gas. They will not give up until they have wrung the last cent they can get from us and they do not care that when that happens we will not have an alternative in place. To hell with the needs of the people.

... so how did it suddenly have to go broke once the green energy initiative funds of 2010 made the headlines?:sarcasm:

From a link that I found in:<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x307645>

<snip>
"Over the last decade, Beacon Power, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), California Energy Commission (CEC), the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and various ISOs, has developed an advanced flywheel-based energy storage technology to perform fast-response frequency regulation. This technology has highly attractive performance attributes, low variable operating costs, and produces zero direct CO2 greenhouse gas or other emissions."
<snip>
Source: http://www.beaconpower.com/solutions/frequency-regulation.asp

I hope both of these links explain the significance of the technology for which Beacon Power received grants. Thank you to the OP for the DU link. It is worth clicking on and spending 10 minutes at the links so as to better understand what is at hand here.

How to big oil make solyndra fail?

... because silicon material prices have remained low over the past 4 years. That is what put Solyndra's thin film photo voltaic panels at a (temporary) disadvantage due to the cost to manufacture, which was hoped would be offset by higher silicon prices, as traditional silicon-intensive photovoltaics use more of it.

<snip>
"For better or worse, Solyndra went down a different path than traditional silicon-intensive photovoltaics (PVs), and invested in thin-film PV panels, which use less silicon, in an effort to cut down on costs. Had the cost of silicon gone up in the last five years, Solyndra’s story outcome may be different..."
<snip>
Source: <http://sustainableindustries.com/articles/2011/09/solyndra-conumdrum>

Mods: I am sorry if it appears I am getting off topic in this thread, but I wanted to make the distinction between to very different situations experienced by these cutting edge technology start ups.

Source: Reuters

(Reuters) - Beacon Power Corp filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, just a year after the energy storage company received a $43 million loan guarantee from a controversial Department of Energy program.

The bankruptcy comes about two months after Solyndra -- a solar panel maker with a $535 million loan guarantee -- also filed for Chapter 11, creating a political embarrassment for the administration of President Barack Obama, which has championed the loans as a way to create "green energy" jobs.

Beacon Power drew down $39 million of its government-guaranteed loan to fund a portion of a $69 million, 20-megawatt flywheel energy storage plant in Stephentown, New York.



Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/31/us-beaconpower-bankruptcy-idUSTRE79T39320111031

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Seems to be a pattern

because that seems to be where the problem is: Some one making poor decisions about how money should be spent with regard to that program.

There is no way a revolution in new energy will happen while BIG energy is in the driver's seat either through lobbying or
by holding positions within the government.

trying to sabotage the alternative energy movement.

'energy star' programs too. They are claiming to be green but their products are not being properly tested.
In many cases the government is relying on tests done by the companies themselves. And we know where that leads.

that is, whatever the company wants it to mean, for the most part.

Becaon Power is not a company that produces power. Several commenters at one site seem to be unclear on that concept:

Beacon Power bankrupt; had U.S. backing like Solyndra

Scroll down to to the comments:





These individuals are really, really confused.

Beacon Power does not produce kilowatts. I'm sure they never claimed they would. The flywheels, which are not perpetual motion devices, regulate the power that has been produced elsewhere, and the way that power is produced is immaterial.

In the United States, current flows into your house at a particular frequency. Look at anything you have that plugs into the wall. Somewhere on the back, it will say that the device runs on 60 Hz AC, or 50 to 60 Hz AC. In other countries, the energy comes in at 50 Hz. Some devices are less demanding regarding frequency than others, but I don't want to get into that conversation right now.

What Beacon Power is trying to do is to make the frequency of the energy delivered to your house or business exceedingly precise. In other words, the frequency without the flywheels might be 60 Hz plus or minus 0.5 Hz. I don't know; I'm just picking that number out of a hat. With the flywheels, Beacon Power wants to make the precision more like 60 Hz plus or minus 0.05 Hz or plus or minus 0.01 Hz. Again, I'm picking numbers out of a hat. The point is, Beacon Power's product was precision.

The variation now comes from instanteous changes in the load on power plant turbines. The turbines speed up or slow down as the load drops or increases. The power plant can be a gas turbine plant, a coal-fired plant with steam turbines, an oil-burning plant with steam turbines, a nuclear facility with steam turbines, or maybe a hydro facility, though I'm sure not sure about that last one. Solar facilities probably already have some sophisticated frequency regulation, and there's no need to worry about variations in turbine speed. I suppose that wind facilities also have some nice frequency regulation.

When there is a need to correct for frequency variations coming from the power plant, that's where Beacon Power comes in. Beacon Power's flywheels compensate for the change in power plant load, regardless of how that power is produced. I'll bet that Beacon Power is probably more than willing to work with any power producer out there.

Neither is the technology some sort of perpetual motion fantasy, nor is Beacon Power a power producer. Energy stored in flywheels the size of small automobiles rotating at 16,000 rpm is released to the grid when needed. When the instanteous powerline frequency goes up, the flywheels absorb the excess. The trick is how to keep those automobile-size flywheels turning at 16,000 rpm without flying apart, with disastrous results.

Because I don't work in the power generation industry, I might have some details of that explanation wrong, and I invite corrections.

Disclaimer: I have no financial stake in Beacon Power or any of its competitors.

"boondoggle."

Of course, I don't rule out sabotaging bureaucrats. Or not too bright bureacrats.