Electric Power Grid Battery Systems
AONE is working with AES Energy Storage, LLC, a unite of AES Corporation to
engineer, manufacture and install multi-megawatt battery systems, called Hybrid
Ancillary Power Units, or Hybrid-APUs, that provide standby reserve capacity by
delivering power quickly in order to offset supply shortages caused by generator
or transmission outages, and frequency regulation, by regulating the minute-to –minute frequency fluctuations in the grid that are caused by changes in supply
and demand. In the electric grid services market, A123 only competes with Saft
and Altairnano. However, competition is expected to arise from manufacturers of
other new battery technologies, such as sodium-sulphur from NGK
Insulators, Ltd. in Japan, redox flow batteries from companies including Prudent
Energy and developers of flywheel technologies, such as Beacon Power Corp.