YCON, designer and manufacturer of energy storage flywheel systems, announced it was awarded a $3.6 million contract by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) to install a Wayside Energy Storage Substation (WESS) at the L.A. Metro Red Line Westlake/MacArthur Park Station utilizing VYCON's REGEN clean energy flywheel systems.

The WESS is largely funded by the Federal Transit Administration under the Transit Investments for Greenhouse Gas and Energy Reduction with funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

VYCON's clean energy high-speed flywheel technology will recycle part of the energy in the system by absorbing and storing in kinetic form energy regenerated by braking trains in the line and returning this stored energy to trains in acceleration in a clean, instantaneous form. This recycling of energy will save electricity otherwise wasted in the form of heat.

VYCON's REGEN flywheel system captures the wasted energy at cycles as low as once per minute and can scale up in power capacity with parallel systems.

The new WESS system will also demonstrate how it can replace Traction Power Substations with voltage levels support, lower the cost of peak power demands, reduce energy consumption, decrease resistor bank and/or friction heat generation (wasted energy), and lower power demands to the utility during critical peak power usage.

Over the next year, VYCON plans to collaborate with several transit agencies around the world to install demonstration sites that will provide real-world data for energy and power savings as well as validating REGEN's ability to eliminate voltage sag issues, and most importantly, the ability to replace chemical battery-based Traction Power Substations.