Commissioned by Active Power, the Reliability Study of Integrated Flywheel UPS System is a quantitative analysis of the in-service reliability of the company’s CleanSource 300 UPS system versus a double conversion UPS system with batteries. 

“We found that demand failures of the flywheel energy storage system are extremely unlikely,” said Steve Fairfax, president of MTechnology, Inc. “If the flywheel is operational at the moment an outage occurs, the flywheel will almost certainly function. Conversely, a system supported by an electrochemical battery has a much higher probability of suffering a demand failure in a utility outage. Even with good monitoring and testing practices, it is difficult to predict the performance of the battery during an interruption. The flywheel-based CleanSource UPS is a dynamic electromechanical system so conditions that could lead to failure are relatively easy to detect and repair. Changes in values that determine the system’s health can be observed before an outage occurs.”