Daniel Bakholdin — a well known veteran in flywheel development and commercialization — was appointed chief technology officer for the US firm Amber Kinetics. He will be responsible for advancing the commercialization of the company’s four-hour discharge duration steel flywheel technology.

Ed Chiao, chief executive officer at Amber Kinetics said: “Bakholdin has been in the flywheel and turbo machinery industry for more than 20 years and has shipped over 1,000 commercial flywheels. He brings major bona fides to our flywheel commercialization efforts.”

Bakholdin has 26 years of experience in engineering and management. He co-founded Pentadyne Power Corp, where he worked as vice president of mechanical engineering and later oversaw production engineering as vice president of sustaining engineering.

Pentadyne, now Powerthru, develops and manufactures flywheel energy storage systems for power quality and power recycling applications. Bakholdin invented or co-invented much of the technology utilized in Powerthru’s machines.

Bakholdin was previously a consultant to a range of power and energy tech start-ups. Concurrently, he was a director of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies magnetic propulsion and levitation development laboratory.

From 2012 to 2014, he was chief operating officer of Rotonix USA. Rotonix developed a 1MW energy storage flywheel system for power quality and recycling applications. Bakholdin orchestrated the company’s US-based R&D and Rotating Group production facility. He also oversaw the establishment and tooling of Rotonix China’s production facility in Beijing.

From 2008 to 2011, Bakholdin was chief operating officer at Advanced Turbine Designs, a company developing a 5kW microturbine gen-set for distributed power generation and residential combined heat and power applications.

He is also a co-founder and former president of Quadradyne (acquired by Pentadyne), the HEV project manager at Capstone Turbine Corp and manager of design engineering and testing at Rosen Motors, an innovative developer of flywheel power systems.

Amber Kinetics (formerly Berkeley Energy Sciences Corp), was co-founded by Ed Chiao and Seth Sanders, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California-Berkeley.

Amber Kinetics was incubated at the University of California-Berkeley’s Skydeck before launching commercial operations in 2013.