Beacon Power Corp. (fka BCONQ)

[mrholty]

As we all know buying BCONQ at this point is gambling on a lotto that is hoping the asset sales bring back more than what they owe to the DOE. At that point anything over $45M should go to shareholders assuming its a complete sale of the company (I don't think they will be able to sell the plant to continue to go it alone, nor should they) as they need funding.

Here is part of an email I got from a guy who is a notorious bear on BCON so take it for what its worth.

The Beacon Power Gen 4 FES is obsolete. It has about 85% efficiency with its bearings system. There are designs with passive magnetic bearings (such as the LLNL design licensed by Amber Kinetics) that will be closer to 95% efficiency. They went to market one generation too early with an infeasible product before market rules were in place. The race is on to develop the new composite materials that will enable higher RPMs. It is the market rules for Pay For Performance that will delay grid storage. CAISO joined ISO-NE this week in petitioning FERC to delay implementation of the PFP Order 755. You probably won't see PFP in place until 2013. Beacon has hundreds of creditors and next to no assets. They aren't even lottery-ticket-worthy at 5 cents. There is no chance of value in the current common shares and to give the delusional Beaconites any glimmer of hope is just cruel at this point

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I have no idea how far along Amber Kinetics is but I have heard their name during my research of flywheel technologies but they appear to be still in lab and that is a long way to actual production. ACPW is another flywheel company but completely different tech (low speed) vs BCONQ (high speed) so comparisons and business models are not great.

At the end of the day I hope and believe there will be willing bidders who want BCONQ expertise in buying this tech and the lotto ticket may happen but again its a small investment for me. I've read more on the energy storage business that I hope to make future investments in this area in the future as its very interesting and all the players all small with potential huge upside long-term. I just haven't found the sweet spot stock yet.