Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

VYCON, a leading provider of power protection, already has a pretty impressive resume as it’s received 15 awards over the last three years and has been included in INC’s 500 fasted growing privately held companies list. But, today, the company added one more accomplishment to its resume – the fact that it is the first to combine patented flywheel technology with batteries in one integrated system.

The Hybrid VDC XEB flywheel system, the industry’s first environmentally friendly energy storage system, allows users who need more backup time to utilize the reliability and green aspects of the flywheel system with minutes of extra runtime from the batteries.

“We are taking our core technology which is the VYCON flywheel energy storage system and we are marrying that up with a very high-quality, high-performance lead-acid battery in a packaged system where it is monitored, metered, wired up and all ready to go for a customer that wants that type of combined technology,” Dann McKeraghan, VYCON’s vice president of sales and marketing, told TMCnet. “If you have really bad power after more than a year or two you usually need to buy another battery. But, by paralleling that with flywheel, now that battery has a chance to live five or six years.”

VYCON, which was established in 2002, is a manufacturer of technologically advanced flywheel energy storage systems. VYCON uses patented technology in rotating machinery to provide equipment that is reliable, long lasting and essentially maintenance free.

The idea to introduce the Hybrid VDC XEB came from demand from the market, according to McKeraghan. While 80 percent of VYCON’s customers strictly want to purchase flywheel technology (or battery-free UPS systems), another 20 percent of its customers take VYCON’s flywheel technology and marry it with batteries.

When the two combine together, the result is very few outages, according to company officials.

The VDC XEB is the first line of defense against power disturbances – saving the batteries for prolonged power outages, according to company officials. By absorbing the power glitches, the VDC XEB can significantly increase battery life by handling over 98 percent of the discharges that would normally have shortened the battery’s useful life.

The new offering provides up to 300 kilowatts (kW) of power, making VYCON’s Hybrid VDC XEB the optimal power protection solution for power dependent applications such as data centers, healthcare facilities, industrial control systems and other mission-critical operations that may require several minutes of backup power.

“What the customer is now going to get is a system that is fully integrated and monitored,” McKeraghan said. “We are going to monitor all of the batteries and the flywheel system that is in integrated into one touch screen that tracks and monitors everything that is going on.”

Nowadays, power protection is of the utmost importance, particularly as downtime costs can run in the hundreds of thousands. For example, unplanned outages in the healthcare industry can cost $400,000, they can cost $300,000 in the retail space and $500,000 in the education realm, according to McKeraghan.

“There is some significant cost associated with lack of power protection,” McKeraghan said.

So how does VYCON continue to distinguish itself in the power protection space?

“Our position really is as a supplier of stored energy,” McKeraghan said. “The caveat is we look at the way we store energy in the flywheel as a greener way to do it then led acid batteries; that’s part of our distinction.”