Hospital Finds Success With Flywheel-Based Energy Storage

Jul 12, 2006 10:39 AM

Pentadyne Power (www.pentadyne.com), a manufacturer of clean energy storage systems using composite flywheel technology, has announced that Meriter Hospital (www.meriter.com) has ordered three additional Pentadyne VSS+DC flywheel systems to protect the hospital's sensitive medical diagnostic equipment from power outages.

The 448-bed non-profit healthcare facility in Madison, Wisconsin, ordered two Pentadyne systems late last year. The flywheel clean energy storage systems were interfaced with redundant UPS systems to protect operation of the hospital's data centers in the event of a power disturbance. In this battery-parallel UPS configuration, the Pentadyne systems seamlessly provide continuous energy to the data centers in the event of short duration utility outages or other power disturbances.

This system protects the existing UPS batteries from all but longer-term outages, greatly increasing their reliability and reducing maintenance needs. In the event of a longer duration outage, the hospital's generators take over the load and rapidly recharge the flywheels in a matter of seconds, again avoiding use of the existing UPS batteries.

Two of the newly ordered Pentadyne VSS+DC systems will be integrated with a 375-kVA UPS system, and the third with a 75-kVA UPS. Both UPS systems and all three Pentadyne units will protect sensitive diagnostic imaging equipment from outage events.