Beacon Power is working to build a smarter grid with a technology that has been around since Leonardo Da Vinci’s time. Here is how the simple, ubiquitous flywheel may become the next best hope for the U.S. electric grid.

This post originally appeared at Popular Mechanics. You can read the full post on their website. Written by Chris Ladd.

The 2000-pound cylinder of fiberglass, resin and carbon fiber, glossy as a vinyl record, hangs from a mechanical winch above its thick steel chamber. For millennia, flywheels have powered everything from potter’s wheels to steam engines, storing kinetic energy in their momentum as they spin. Now, the flywheel has found a higher purpose in the electrical grid: Wound around a 500-pound rotor, this 5-foot-tall, 3-foot-diameter flywheel assembly at Beacon Power’s plant in Tyngsboro, Mass., appears poised to be the great green hope of that unsung, unsexy, absolutely essential energy niche that is frequency regulation.

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