Qnetic flywheel storage enters EPRI deRISKED validation programme
Qnetic, a developer of mechanical energy storage, has entered the Electric Power Research Institute's (EPRI) deRISKED programme, a structured independent evaluation covering performance, safety, reliability and commercial readiness. The participation is sponsored by Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), one of California's largest publicly owned utilities.
The deRISKED process, which stands for Readiness Informed by Shared Knowhow, Evaluation, and Data, combines laboratory and pilot-scale testing with standardised data analysis. Qnetic will supply EPRI with prototype test data and a full set of pilot system performance results. Published findings will be shared with utilities participating in the programme, providing a third-party evidence base that sits alongside vendor documentation.
The technology
Qnetic's Pulsar flywheel system stores electricity as kinetic energy in a high-speed composite rotor inside a vacuum enclosure, rather than through chemical reactions. The company says the design is engineered for decades of operation with minimal performance degradation and what it describes as virtually unlimited cycling capability. These attributes, if validated independently, would differentiate the technology from lithium-ion batteries, which degrade with each charge-discharge cycle and carry end-of-life disposal costs.
The company's chief executive, Michael Pratt, said utilities need objective evidence when assessing emerging storage technologies. "Independent validation has become just as important as technical innovation," he said. "By participating in EPRI's deRISKED programme and sharing extensive prototype and pilot data, we're giving utilities the transparency they need to evaluate our technology on its technical merits."
Market context
Flywheel storage occupies a niche within the broader long-duration energy storage (LDES) market, which covers systems that can discharge for eight hours or more. The LDES field is crowded and still largely pre-commercial at grid scale: iron-air batteries, vanadium flow batteries, compressed-air systems and thermal storage are all competing for utility procurement budgets that have historically defaulted to four-hour lithium-ion installations. Independent validation programmes such as EPRI's deRISKED are increasingly influential in procurement decisions, because utilities face regulatory scrutiny over technology selection and prefer objective performance benchmarks to developer claims alone.
SMUD's role as programme sponsor is commercially meaningful. The utility has set ambitious 100-per-cent clean-energy targets and has been an active procurer of emerging storage technologies. A positive EPRI assessment would give Qnetic a credible reference for conversations with other US municipal and investor-owned utilities.
The broader policy backdrop matters here. The US Inflation Reduction Act's investment tax credit for standalone storage (which flows from the 48E provision) is available to projects that use eligible technologies, and a validated performance record can smooth the path to project finance. Separately, the Department of Energy's Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships programme has directed federal capital toward storage diversification, reflecting concern that lithium-ion supply chains are concentrated in a small number of geographies.
Qnetic is simultaneously running a retail crowdfunding round through DealMaker, which is worth noting as context: the company is pre-revenue and at pilot scale, making the EPRI programme as much a commercial development exercise as a pure technical one. The timeline for published results and any subsequent utility procurement discussions has not been disclosed. Investors and offtake prospects will watch for the EPRI findings, a named commercial pilot customer, and evidence of a path to full utility-scale deployment as the key near-term milestones.