Active Power Announces 11MW Flywheel Deal

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An Active Power PowerHouse unit providing containerized power infrastructure, including its flywheel UPS.

Active Power has received a multimillion dollar purchase order for its flywheel-based CleanSource UPS systems. The systems, which total nearly 11 megawatts of UPS capacity, are slated for deployment at a data center owned by "one of the world’s leading internet search firms" at a data center facility in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

The Austin, Texas company did not identify the end user, but said it was a company that has previously deployed Active Power equipment. Yahoo is the only web-scale search provider known to use flywheels in its data centers, suggesting that Yahoo has begun additional expansion at its data center campus in Quincy, Washington.

Active Power specializes in flywheel power technology. A flywheel is a spinning cylinder that generates power from kinetic energy, continuing to spin when grid power is interrupted. In most data centers, the UPS system draws power from a bank of large batteries to provide “ride-through” electricity to keep servers online until the diesel generator can start up and begin powering the facility.

“The combined benefits of our power density, reliability, and total cost of ownership (TCO) are unmatched in the market,” said Martin Olsen, vice president, Global Sales, at Active Power. “CleanSource UPS delivers significant TCO savings to the customer’s bottom line, (and) provides energy efficiencies of up to 98 percent at full load. Put simply, we are enabling global innovators like this end user to achieve their most forward thinking data center designs.”