Vycon announced Oct. 30 that the April installation of its Regen kinetic energy storage system at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) Red Line Westlake/MacArthur Park Subway station is already showing significant energy savings. The collected data today indicates that Metro is realizing nearly 20 percent in energy consumption. Based on the data obtained so far, it is estimated an annual savings of 541 megawatt hours (MWh), enough to provide power to 100 average California homes.
Vycon’s flywheel systems are used in what is officially known as Metro’s Wayside Energy Storage Substation (WESS) Project. This energy storage project — a culmination of nearly five years of dedicated research, and development, production, and installation — is funded by a grant provided by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) under the Transit Investments for Greenhouse Gas and Energy Reduction (TIGGER) Program, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.
According to Frank Castro, Metro’s project manager for this WESS Project, “Metro is highly pleased with the operational performance and energy savings realized by this high-tech, first-of-its-kind project. We believe it will contribute to a greener environment and achieve our sustainability goals, and at the same time reducing our utility bills.”
“We are extremely pleased with our Regen’s efficient operation and energy savings to date for Metro,” said Frank DeLattre, president of Vycon. “This is a milestone energy project and we look forward to duplicating these energy savings and operational efficiencies at Metro and other electric rail transportation agencies worldwide.”
The scope of this project is to demonstrate how Vycon’s green regenerative technology stores energy generated by braking trains and efficiently redistributes that energy to rail lines to accelerate trains – vastly improving energy usage that otherwise would be wasted in the form of heat. The operational two-megawatt base WESS utilizes Vycon’s high-speed flywheel technology as a means of recycling energy on the Metro rail system. The system is "expansion ready" for up to six megawatts, through seamless additions of flywheel units in the future.
Metro and Vycon officials recently met with representatives from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to review the favorable results of the agency’s first-of-a-kind use of flywheel technology to recycle power generated from rail cars
“With a 20-year operational life, our Regen flywheel offers additional benefits for rail applications, including reducing peak power demand and providing voltage support with the potential for reducing the number of substations in a new or expanded rail line,” said Octavio Solis, director of engineering for Vycon. “We look forward to the project’s next steps including continually monitoring WESS performance and energy savings until summer of 2015 and then providing a final report with results of the one-year continuous operation.”
Acting as a mechanical battery, the Vycon Regen system stores kinetic energy in the form of a rotating mass and is designed for high power, short-discharge applications.
