American Superconductor Receives SMES Order

American Superconductor Corp. (Westborough, MA) recently announced it has received an order for two of its proprietary superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) units from Edison, the largest private utility in Italy. The company plans to install the units in the summer of 2000 for Edison at an STMicroelectronics chip manufacturing plant in Agrate, Italy. ST will lease the units from Edison.The two SMES units for ST are designed to provide protection to critical processes in the ST chip manufacturing facility from momentary sags in voltage that occur on power delivery lines and which can interrupt a chip manufacturing operation for hours."ST is dedicated to continual improvement in productivity, yield and reliability of delivery of products to its customers in its chip fabrication facilities worldwide," said Dr. Giuseppi Mariani, general manager of ST's Agrate facility. "Following an in-depth analysis of SMES, we believe that this product can significantly help increase our productivity and reliability by providing protection from voltage sags.""The increasing recognition by chip manufacturers of their need for full solutions to power quality problems is growing as competition in the semiconductor industry continues to increase," said Greg Yurek, American Superconductor's chief executive. "We believe the power quality solution we are providing for ST, which incorporates the latest technology from our S-SMES product line, is the lowest cost, most effective solution on the market today."