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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More efficient energy storage has been a difficult issue for scientists to crack. It is a major issue preventing more widespread use of renewable energy, and solar energy in particular.

Is this project, one funded by a true oil giant, the one that will make it happen?

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They say that nothing is free, but I may have come across the exception. In West Texas and Illinois, electric customers are being paid to use electricity. With the growth of wind energy in areas like Texas, Iowa and Minnesota, electric companies are occasionally producing more energy—especially during off-peak hours—than they can use. Why not store it you ask? Because there are not yet any good ways to store energy; a quest since electricity was created.

According to expert Terry Boston, who is the CEO of PJM, a company that manages the electricity grid in 13 mid-Atlantic states and Washington, the oversupply of electricity has forced prices into the negative range. The result: some customers are paid to use electricity.

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RET’s basic technology is this: they have a retrofitable hydraulic propulsion system for large vehicles that stores energy in hydraulic cylinders with compressed gas. The vehicle, such as a city bus, then uses that stored energy to give it a boost when starting up. The technology is known as RPS, or Retrofitable Propulsion System, and reduces fuel use by 25 percent and emissions by 25 percent. But before you finish mumbling about how improved fuel economy doesn’t eliminate our dependence on fossil-fuel based energy, this system can improve the fuel and emissions of vehicles using all forms of fuel including ethanol, biodiesel, compressed natural gas, propane and more.

“We like to say that the vehicle is indifferent and fuel agnostic,” said Sam Jones, President of Recaptured Energy Technologies.

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A more timid school district might have run from off-peak energy storage altogether. But not Hillsborough. They are taking what they learned and applying their school of hard knocks expertise in selecting from the many companies that now provide second generation night cooling technology to power air conditioning systems.

What’s changed since the eighties is the addition of more wind power to the grid, and the likelihood of more to come with RPS legislation requiring the purchase of more renewable power in many states.

Typically most wind power comes ongrid at night; much more than can be used.

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New research at the University of Florida (UF) has just brought to light a new method in the capturing and guiding of energy that may lead to cheaper and more efficient solar cells.

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Setting its sights on the burgeoning US market for car batteries, cutting-edge Swiss zinc-air battery company, ReVolt, has decided to take advantage of Oregon’s generous business tax credits for development of next generation car technologies.

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In a surprising find, scientists have discovered a microbe that can efficiently convert direct electrical current into methane.

That may be good news for wind and solar power enthusiasts, who have long been faced with the dilemma of how to store energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. This discovery opens the door for generating methane from those renewable power sources; the energy could then be stored as fuel for later use.

But is storing renewable energy in the form of a greenhouse gas like methane a solution, or just another problem?

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Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have discovered a solution to the problem of reliable storage for alternative energy: a bacteria that can convert electricity to methane when combined with CO2.

Any surplus power from wind, solar, or tidal sources is fed into the bacteria and combined with CO2 from the atmosphere to create methane for storage. Methane is a clean-burning gas and 80% of energy fed into the process was retained at the end.

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Wilmington, Mass.-based fuel-cell company Lilliputian Systems, which announced it raised $28 million this week, wants to set the record straight.

In October, The Wall Street Journal wrote that the company would be shipping its matchbook-sized fuel cells late this year. But now, the company — which is developing the cells for a range of consumer electronics, including cell phones and laptops — isn’t saying when its products will be commercially available, only that it plans to announce the timing this summer. Does that mean we can expect a delay?

Mouli Ramani, vice president for business development, tells me that’s not the case. When he spoke with the Journal, he was referring to a test-market launch with its partners, not a commercial launch that would make the fuel cells available to the general public, he says. In other words, don’t expect to be able to buy Lilliputian fuel cells at Best Buy this year.

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Their “Crazy Green Idea” to develop a new storage medium, an “ultra-capacitor,” generated the highest number of votes to be crowned champions of this competition and be the recipients of the $25,000 prize check from Prize Capital.

Check out the video that won them the competition.

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What do you think of their idea? Is it doable? Is it worth $25,000?

A Massachusetts man - faced with no power in the recent ice storm, powered up the family Prius to create electricity: The hybrid car made enough electricity to run the essentials; the fridge, the lights, the TV, the wood-stove fan. During the power outage, it supplied 17 Kilowatt hours of energy to his home for three days.

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The exploratory discussions are being conducted at top levels and among firms like PG&E who see plug in hybrid and all electric vehicles as a solution to uneven grid loads. Utilities have invested a great deal of research using the vehicle to grid (V2G) capabilities of plugged in electric vehicles to stabilize the grid.

The idea being considered would involve joining together to put in a substantial order to put weight behind development of Plug In Hybrids (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs). The idea is that large fleet orders would provide the certain market car makers need to make the initial move away from fossil fueled vehicles.

With their buying power (they could order 50,000 electric vehicles for their fleets) utilities could provide a solid beginning to switching Detroit to entirely new vehicle markets.

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Better Place and Hawaii have joined forces. This week the State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company endorsed a plan to build a new renewable transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and a “smart” battery recharging network.

The Better Place plan solves the current problem with electric cars, which is slow battery recharging as well as availability. The solution is to use existing electric car technologies together with an internet-connected web of recharging stations (set up in the thousands).

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Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a new way of storing energy from sunlight that could lead to ‘unlimited’ solar power.

The process, loosely based on plant photosynthesis, uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. When needed, the gases can then be re-combined in a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity whether the sun is shining or not.

According to project leader Prof. Daniel Nocera, “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years. Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now, we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

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The island state’s small size makes for short drives, which are perfect for electric vehicles, and now an innovative network of recharging stations will make the cars even more convenient.

California-based company Better Place will operate the stations on a subscription-based system. Owners could sign-up for a monthly plan or choose to pay as they use. The company will own the batteries, which can run upwards to $11,000, and loan them out to drivers.

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Using a one-atom thick, carbon-based material known as graphene, the research team says it has already matched the energy storage capacities of today’s ultracapacitors. Eventually, their calculations show, graphene sheets could store twice as much energy as a standard ultracapacitor.

We currently have two main ways to store electrical energy: in batteries and in ultracapacitors. Finding an effective way to store large amounts of energy is critical for making the most of renewable energy sources like sun and wind, which deliver variable — rather than constant and steady — amounts of energy.

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I thought it might be worth taking a few minutes to remember that people who developed internal combustion engines were not people focused on selling fossil fuels, they were people interested in solving a very real challenge - energy storage and delivery on a moving vehicle. When all factors are taken into account, fossil fuels provide a compact, lightweight form of energy that can be readily converted to power in device that is moving - sometimes very rapidly and without any connection to the earth.

There are certainly times in all of our lives when we feel like the big oil companies have us over a barrel, but their dominance came as a result of the high performance that their product gave to automobiles, trains, trucks, ships and aircraft. By many measures, their product remains the best technical choice available.

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