Cryptogon has some Eestor tinfoil - Did Crashed Lockheed Martin HALE-D Airship Have EEStor Systems On Board?.

If you’re not familiar with the EEStor story, I’ve done several posts on it over the years.

With regard to this HALE-D airship crash, let’s first note Lockheed Martin’s links to EEStor. This is from 2008: Lockheed Martin to Use EEstor’s Ultracapacitors for Military and Homeland Security Applications:

Lockheed Martin has signed an exclusive international rights agreement to integrate and market Electrical Energy Storage Units (EESU) from EEStor, Inc., for military and homeland security applications. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

In the years since then, virtually no EEStor news has come out.

According to Global Security, “The HALE-D is powered by thin-film solar cells and rechargeable lithium ion polymer batteries.”

However, pay close attention to what Joe Myers, Harrison County Sheriff, says in this video starting at 1 minute 37 seconds:

You know it’s top secret through the military, but the batteries was a big thing.[sic] They didn’t want anybody going around that…uh aircraft once it was down. And they wanted us to provide security.

“The batteries was a big thing…”

Lockheed Martin was concerned about the public finding out about lithium ion polymer batteries, commonly used in remote controlled toys, mp3 players and portable computers?

Earth2tech has a look at the state of the ultracapacitor market - How ultracapacitors work (and why they fall short).

Already, Schindall believes some electric vehicle manufacturers are using ultracapacitors for acceleration. The devices also appear in hundreds of other applications, from cell phone base stations to alarm clocks (as backup power) to audio systems.

For most music, Schindall explained, a high-end audio system with big speakers might do just fine with a 1-watt amplifier. “But then the kettle drum comes in,” demanding a sudden power surge of 1-kilowatt. One solution, Schindall said, is to build a 1-watt supply, plus an ultracapacitor to handle the peak.

Ultracapacitors hold promise for a similar job on the electric grid. Today, transmission lines operate below full capacity (often somewhere above 90 percent), said Schindall, in order to leave a buffer for power surges. Banks of ultracapacitors could be set up to absorb power surges, enabling transmission lines to run closer to 100 percent capacity.

It might not seem like much, especially considering that it would take warehouse-sized banks for ultracaps to do the job. But installing ultracapacitors to handle the peaks would actually be much cheaper, Schindall said, than adding even 5 percent more capacity with new transmission lines.

In cars, ultracapacitors could play a role in the growing market for “microhybrids,” which cut the engine during idling. In these “start-stop” systems, Schindall explained in an email, “The ultracapacitor would provide power during the stop (lights, radio, air conditioner, etc.).” It would also provide power for the restart, and then be “recharged during the next interval of travel.”

How to build better ultracapacitors

There are two basic ways to improve the performance of ultracapacitors: increase the surface area of the plate coating, and increase the maximum amount of voltage that the device can handle.

Recall old Faraday again. Capacitance, measured in Farads, is how much electric energy our device will hold given a certain voltage. Increase the voltage, and you can increase the amount of energy our device holds (energy is equal to half the capacitance, multiplied by voltage squared).

Schindall is tackling the surface area challenge using carbon nanotubes (more like a shag carpet or paintbrush than the sponge-like activated carbon). Other researchers, he noted, are working with graphene or better activated carbon. In addition to boosting the surface area, carbon nanotubes and graphene can also “withstand a somewhat higher voltage” than activated carbon, said Schindall.

The voltage challenge, meanwhile “seems to be a tougher road,” he said. Researchers are experimenting with ionic liquid electrolytes (all ion, no solvent, behaves like a liquid), which under the right conditions can operate at up to three times the voltage of conventional electrolytes.

But ionic liquids are “fussy,” Schindall said. “They don’t like being liquids,” and tend to freeze below room temperature. They’re also expensive, and they have higher resistance than conventional electrolytes, which means you can’t get energy out as fast. The maximum power—one of ultracaps’ key advantages—is decreased. As Schindall put it, “There’s always a tradeoff.”

Earth2Tech reports Tesla CEO Elon Musk is looking forward to a breakthrough in energy storage using capacitors - Tesla CEO: I’d Bet On Capacitors Over Batteries.

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk says he bets that it could be capacitors — rather than batteries — that deliver an important breakthrough for electric transportation. “If I were to make a prediction, I’d think there’s a good chance that it is not batteries. But capacitors,” said Musk at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Capacitors, or ultracapacitors, are energy storage devices that can deliver quick bursts of intense power and can withstand more charge and discharge cycles than batteries. They’re like batteries, and can be used in complement with batteries.

But it’s interesting that the CEO of a company that bases its technology around standardized, small format, lithium-ion batteries would make such a comment. Perhaps Tesla is doing some R&D on capacitor storage deep in its Palo Alto, Calif. labs?

The original reason Musk came out to California years ago was to do research on advanced, high energy density capacitors at Stanford, and to try to leverage what Musk said was tens of billions of dollars of R&D that’s been applied to capacitors for advanced ship making. But then, that whole Internet thing and PayPal happened. And then Tesla (and SolarCity and SpaceX).

Musk says he’s optimistic there will be a solution found by one or another companies in the capacitor space that “will supercede,” batteries. The capacitor companies I’ve written about include Ioxus, which makes ultracapacitors for transportation in complement with batteries; EEstor, which seems like it’s not ever going to deliver anything; Recapping, which is backed by Khosla Ventures and won an ARPA-E grant; and EnerG2, which makes materials for ultracapacitor makers.

CNet has a post on a hybrid battery-ultracapacitor - Hybrid storage melds battery, ultracapacitor.

In the geeky world of energy storage, there are well-understood limitations to plain old batteries and to ultracapacitors, devices able to store relatively little energy but also deliver big bursts of power.

Energy storage company Ioxus on Monday plans to announce a hybrid storage device that combines the attributes of an ultracapacitor with a lithium-ion battery. In the first quarter of next year, it plans to make available a second generation of the device, which could potentially be used in auto applications, according to Ioxus CEO Mark McGough.

Its first hybrid will store more than twice the energy of traditional ultracapacitors, and charging is done on the order of seconds, rather than hours as in the case of traditional batteries, according to the company.

The device, which is about the size of a C cell battery, won't propel a plug-in electric car. But it could be used for power tools, off-grid lighting, and handheld medical devices, according to McGough.

If used in an ear probe for medical applications, for example, a doctor could fully charge the probe in 90 seconds or partially charge in 20 seconds, McGough said. The company is now providing sample to designers in different industries.

"What we've been able to do is take the fast charge/discharge of ultracapacitors and improve the energy density by designing in a lithium ion electrode and putting it all in the same device," McGough said. The device combines the activated carbon material of an ultracapacitor that stores charge and layers of lithium ion material wrapped in a cylinder form, he explained.

The trade-off to the hybrid design is that it won't have the same cycle life--or charge/discharge cycles-- as ultracapacitors. People can expect 20,000 cycles versus millions of cycles for an ultracapacitor, McGough said.

The long cycle life makes it suitable for use in places where replacing a battery would be difficult, such as off-grid lighting. Within cars, it could be used to run smaller motors, such as the ones that raise and lower power windows, in order to lighten the load and cabling from the main battery.

Technology Review has an article on research into combining ultracapacitors with thin film solar - Big Energy Storage in Thin Films.

Energy storage devices called ultracapacitors can be recharged many more times than batteries, but the total amount of energy they can store is limited. This means that the devices are useful for providing intense bursts of power to supplement batteries but less so for applications that require steady power over a long period, such as running a laptop or an engine.

Now researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia have demonstrated that it's possible to use techniques borrowed from the chip-making industry to make thin-film carbon ultracapacitors that store three times as much energy by volume as conventional ultracapacitor materials. While that is not as much as batteries, the thin-film ultracapacitors could operate without ever being replaced.

These charge-storage films could be fabricated directly onto RFID chips and the chips used in digital watches, where they would take up less space than a conventional battery. They could also be fabricated on the backside of solar cells in both portable devices and rooftop installations, to store power generated during the day for use after sundown. The materials have been licensed by Pennsylvania startup Y-Carbon.

An ultracapacitor is "an electrical energy source that has virtually unlimited lifetime," says Yury Gogotsi, professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who led the development of the thin-film ultracapacitors. "It will live longer than any electronic device and never needs to be replaced." While batteries store and release energy in the form of chemical reactions, which cause them to degrade over time, ultracapacitors work by transferring surface charges. This means they can charge and discharge rapidly, and because the electrode materials aren't involved in any chemical reactions, they can be cycled hundreds of thousands of times. Researchers have begun developing thin-film ultracapacitor materials but have had difficulty getting high enough total energy storage using practical fabrication methods, says Gogotsi.

Gogotsi's group uses a high-vacuum method called chemical vapor deposition to create thin films of metal carbides such as titanium carbide on the surface of a silicon wafer. The films are then chlorinated to remove the titanium, leaving behind a porous film of carbon. In each place where a titanium atom was, a small pore is left behind. "The film is like a molecular sponge, where the size of each pore is equal to the size of a single ion," says Gogotsi. This matching means that when used as the charge-storage material in an ultracapacitor, the carbon films can accumulate a large amount of total surface charge.

Gas 2.0 has an update on the rather pitiful tale of ZENN motors and ultracapacitor company EEStor - ZENN Motors and Mystery of EEStor Ultracapacitor Gets Deeper. More at TreeHugger.

The whole EEStor/ZENN saga is getting so ridiculous that I often find myself debating whether or not I should even cover it anymore. The (so far) mythical EESU energy storage unit that’s supposed to revolutionize personal mobility by providing instantaneous charge times in a lightweight “battery” that can take a car 700 miles on a charge has yet to see the light of day.

EEStor missed its deadline of introducing a working EESU to the world by the end of last year. When that happened I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it. It just seemed, well, pathetic.

Now ZENN Motors, the company with a huge stake in EEStor, has said they have “successfully” ceased actually building cars and laid off 15 people so that they can stop bleeding cash. All of their eggs are now in the EEStor basket.

ZENN Motors’ new plan revolves around the EESU actually working. Their self-stated goal is to be the sole provider of EESUs to manufacturers — akin to intel supplying chips for computers. But as time goes on and we hear nothing, not a peep, from EEStor, the chances of ZENN actually surviving this change seem slim.

Technology Review has an article on buses using fast (and frequent) recharging ultracapacitors for energy storage (using existing technology rather than heavily promoted but possibly mythical examples like EEstor's device) - Next Stop: Ultracapacitor Buses.

Municipal transit agencies have tried to reduce the carbon footprint of their bus fleets using a range of options over the years, from biofuels and hydrogen to batteries and hybrid-electric diesel. Now a Chinese company and its U.S. partner say that ultracapacitors could offer the greenest and most economical way of powering inner-city buses.

There's just one catch: the best ultracapacitors can only store about 5 percent of the energy that lithium-ion batteries hold, limiting them to a couple of miles per charge. This makes them ineffective as an energy storage medium for passenger vehicles. But what ultracapacitors lack in range they make up in their ability to rapidly charge and discharge. So in vehicles that have to stop frequently and predictably as part of normal operation, energy storage based exclusively on ultracapacitors begins to make sense.

Sinautec Automobile Technologies, based in Arlington, VA, and its Chinese partner, Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Company, have spent the past three years demonstrating the approach with 17 municipal buses on the outskirts of Shanghai. On October 21, the two companies will offer a one-day demonstration at American University in Washington, DC, where an 11-seat minibus running on ultracapacitors will spend the day shuttling people around campus.

Also at Technology Review, Kevin Bullis has a post on using flow batteries in electric vehicles - Flow Batteries For Fast Electric Car Charging

Electric vehicles can take hours to recharge, making cross-country road trips a challenge. But researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Germany say they've got a potential solution: flow batteries. ...

But here's the catch: one of the reasons hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have come under fire recently is that you need to install a large infrastructure for distributing and dispensing hydrogen. A flow battery system would have a similar problem. You'd need to install special refueling stations where the spend electrolytes can be recharged and dispensed.

Technology Review has an article on the potential for ultracapacitors to augment conventional batteries in hybrid vehicle designs - Ultracaps Could Boost Hybrid Efficiency.

Energy storage devices called ultracapacitors could lower the cost of the battery packs in plug-in hybrid vehicles by hundreds or even thousands of dollars by cutting the size of the packs in half, according to estimates by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL. Ultracapacitors could also dramatically improve the efficiency of another class of hybrid vehicle that uses small electric motors, called microhybrids, according to a recent study from the University of California, Davis.

The use of ultracapacitors in hybrids isn't a new idea. But the falling cost of making these devices and improvements to the electronics needed to regulate their power output and coordinate their interaction with batteries could soon make them more practical, says Theodore Bohn, a researcher at Argonne's Advanced Powertrain Research Facility.

Although batteries have improved significantly in recent years, the cost of making them is the main the reason why hybrids cost thousands of dollars more than conventional vehicles. This is especially true of plug-in hybrids, which rely on large battery packs to supply all or most of the power during short trips. Battery packs are expensive in part because they degrade over time and, to compensate for this, automakers oversize them to ensure that they can provide enough power even after 10 years of use in a vehicle.

Ultracapacitors offer a way to extend the life of a hybrid vehicle's power source, reducing the need to oversize its battery packs. Unlike batteries, ultracapacitors don't rely on chemical reactions to store energy, and they don't degrade significantly over the life of a car, even when they are charged and discharged in very intense bursts that can damage batteries. The drawback is that they store much less energy than batteries--typically, an order of magnitude less. If, however, ultracapacitors were paired with batteries, they could protect batteries from intense bursts of power, Bohn says, such as those needed for acceleration, thereby extending the life of the batteries. Ultracapacitors could also ensure that the car can accelerate just as well at the end of its life as at the beginning.

Reducing the size of a vehicle's battery pack by 25 percent could save about $2,500, Bohn estimates. The ultracapacitors and electronics needed to coordinate them with the batteries could cost between $500 and $1,000, resulting in hundreds of dollars of net savings.

Ultracapacitors would also make it possible to redesign batteries to hold more energy. There is typically a tradeoff between how fast batteries can be charged and discharged and how much total energy they can store. That's true in part because designing a battery to discharge quickly requires using very thin electrodes stacked in many layers. Each layer must be separated by supporting materials that take up space in the battery but don't store any energy. The more layers used, the more supporting materials are needed and the less energy can be stored in the battery. Paired with ultracapacitors, batteries wouldn't need to deliver bursts of power and so could be made with just a few layers of very thick electrodes, reducing the amount of supporting material needed. That could make it possible to store twice as much energy in the same space, Bohn says.

TreeHugger has a post in last week's bout of publicity for EEstor - Super Secretive Supercapacitor CEO Tells All in Leaked Phone Call.

In what appears to be a huge leak, the notoriously secretive Dick Weir of Eestor did a phone call with someone that got out, copied, transcribed and put up on TheEEStory.com.

We have been losing hope that the eeStor ultracap would ever arrive, but it appears that a car that charges in minutes and runs for hours, a wind turbine that stores its own energy, notebook computers and cellphones that charge in seconds and run for days could be months, not years, away.

Tyler Hamilton of Clean Break, who has spoken to Weir a few times, confirms that it is his voice. He also does a great summary of the conversation.

This is deep stuff, and probably very embarrassing for the secretive Weir. There are even allusions to its military uses, who knows, supercapacitor-powered weapons. All our years of coverage of eeStor tells us that this release is just a huge mistake. The aud.io of the interview is being sucked off the net everywhere, but the transcription is still out there.

W: So I said let's do something better than that. Let's get in bed with Lockheed Martin and when I went and gave presentation? to CIA and they suggested that. And so I did. And that 's worked out exceptionally well. We now have a contract with them where they handle all of our contracts with ... government contracts ... with Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security. And writes? rides? rights? other worldwide contracts. So now I don't have to be a military contractor. I went and got the world's best.

I: Umhh

W: And they can be between me and the Federal Government to handle all this stuff. Then they write a commercial contract with me to supply parts to Lockheed and or for military contracts for other groups. So that they can build these mission critical systems.

I: OK. Since you're no longer a VC ... Does that mean you guys are seeing revenue come in from Lockheed, at this point? ... Significant?

W: We had a con ... government contract and we received money off from it, but not revenue. But just, uhh ... they wanted to do some technical studies. We did that for 'em. And they paid us some good money for it.

I: All right.

W: It was a DARPA contract.

I: K

W: Which will lead to a bigger contract.

Notwithstanding the embarrassment, I am thrilled to hear that this thing works, that it is already at the Underwriters Laboratory approval stage, and that Zenn cars may be rolling off the line soon. A few of the key claims as summarized by Tyler at Clean Break:

* On storage for PCs and handhelds. “We can take a battery for a cellphone and give you three to five times more energy storage that would never degrade on you and you can charge in seconds.”
* Electric vehicles: “It’s going to take time to emerge, but I think with ZENN Motors it’s going to be very interesting to see them grow dramatically to capture that market.”

* On portable tools: “I’m already in knee-deep with the people in the portable tool business. They’re waiting for me to emerge and they’ll come on strong.”

Read the whole transcript at The Eestory

Cleantech.com has a report that there has been some successful testing of Eestor's ultracapacitor technology (I'll remain somewhat skeptical until this stuff finally makes it into a commercial product) - Zenn to increase stake in EEStor after test verifies ultracapacitor technology.

Toronto-based electric vehicle maker Zenn Motor (TSX:ZNN) said late today there’s truth to stealth ultracapacitor developer EEStor’s claims of high energy density across a broad range of operating temperatures.

And Zenn is putting its money where its mouth is: The company said it plans to increase its investment in EEStor to between 6.2 percent and 10.5 percent, depending on the actions of other shareholders.

EEStor first announced the technological milestones in late April. Zenn had the equipment verified by a third party, and then conducted the tests again.

As a result, Zenn said it plans to give EEStor a $700,000 milestone payment associated with the technological progress. Zenn previously made three milestone payments to EEStor totaling $1.3 million. A final $500,000 is due when EEStor ships its ultracapacitors. ...

In April, EEStor said its permittivity tests of the manufacturing grade chemicals showed that its composition modified barium titanate (CMBT) powders, the main material in the ultracapacitor technology, achieved relative permittivity of at least 22,500 over an operating range of -20 to +65 degrees Celsius. Permittivity is a measurement of how much energy can be stored in a material.

The results were a reflection of the ability to achieve higher energy density at the same voltage—an important step in commercializing electric vehicles.

EEStor said the claims were verified by Edward Golla, the laboratory director of Texas Research International in Austin, Texas. Golla was also the scientist hired by EEStor for third-party verification of the technology in August 2008 (see EEStor claims third party verification).

Zenn said today it commissioned Professional Testing of Round Rock, Texas, to test the equipment used in Golla’s test for EEStor. Professional Testing also tested the equipment after Golla performed the tests again on Zenn’s behalf.

The tests were conducted on hot-pressed dielectric layers manufactured on EEStor’s production line.

In August, EEStor announced it was able to attain very narrow particle size—another factor determining permittivity (see EEStor's Weir on ultracapacitor milestone). The company has also achieved high purification of its chemicals to allow working voltage without voltage breakdown. EEStor also said it can tune the constituents of its CMBT powders to operate within the paraelectric phase, meeting high working voltages.

Cleantech.com has another report, this one claiming Zenn will include ultracapacitors in their electric vehicles from 2010 - Zenn CEO reveals details of EEStor's progress.

Toronto-based Zenn Motor (TSX:ZNN) plans to incorporate ultracapacitors from stealthy EEStor into full-speed electric vehicles starting in 2010.

The news comes a day after EEStor received third-party verification that it passed its final technology milestone, leaving the company with the sole challenge of bringing its state-of-the-art energy storage system to commercial production (see Zenn to increase stake in EEStor after test verifies ultracapacitor technology).

Zenn CEO Ian Clifford told the Cleantech Group today that the announcement affirms that EEStor will be able to meet its promise to begin commercial production before the end of the year. That clears the path for highway-speed vehicles to incorporate the ultracapacitors in 2010—a slight delay from the fall 2009 target the companies established last year.

Technology Review has an article on using graphene in "ultracapacitors could help the grid run smoothly" - Graphene for the Green Grid. I quite like the idea of branding a smarter, expanded grid as the "green grid".

Integrating irregular sources of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, with the electrical grid, while keeping power output steady, is going to be a big challenge. Energy-storage devices called ultracapacitors could help by storing sudden surges of power. But much will depend on developing a new generation of ultracapacitors with enough storage capacity to meet the likely demand.

Graphene Energy, a startup based in Austin, TX, hopes that ultracapacitors with electrodes made of graphene--sheets of carbon just an atom thick--will be the solution. The storage capacity of an ultracapacitor is limited only by the surface area of its electrodes, and graphene offers a way to greatly increase the area available.

Ultracapacitors store energy electrostatically, instead of chemically, as in batteries. During charging, electrons come to the surface of one electrode, and electron "holes" form on the surface of the other. This draws positive ions in an electrolyte to the first electrode and negative ions to the second. By contrast, the chemical reactions used to charge batteries limit the speed with which they can be charged and eventually cause the electrode materials to break down. Ultracapacitors can be charged and discharged very rapidly, in seconds rather than minutes, and can be recharged millions of times before wearing out.

However, ultracapacitors currently on the market can't match batteries for energy density, so they're mostly used in hybrid systems alongside batteries or for niche applications. Because these devices can handle a rapid influx of large amounts of energy, they're often used to recover energy--for example, when a city bus breaks or a gantry crane lowers its cargo. Ultracapacitors employed in this way have reduced by 40 percent the energy needed by some cranes used in Japanese ports. A few power tools, including an electric drill, take advantage of the rapid recharging ability of ultracapacitors.

Graphene Energy hopes to open up new ultracapacitor applications by developing devices with far higher power output. These ultracapacitors could perhaps be used to regulate surges in the electrical grid or to power hybrid transportation vehicles. The company has $500,000 in seed funding to commercialize graphene ultracapacitors developed by Rodney Ruoff, a professor and chair of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Ruoff is a cofounder of Graphene Energy and also serves as the company's technology advisor.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has a report on Eestor's prime customer, Zenn Motor Co - Zenn and the art of electric car maintenance.

The first thing you notice about a Zenn car is its silence. "You can hear the birds singing driving down an urban street," Ian Clifford, founder of Toronto's Zenn Motor Co., boasted to Rick Mercer, bringing a mock tear to the comedian's eye when he visited the company's assembly plant for a segment of his show last year.

Zenn (for "zero emissions, no noise") is a low-speed electric car, conceived and assembled in Canada. It can go 80 kilometres on one charge, maxing out at 40 km/h, which pretty much limits it to neighbourhood excursions. Some 350 have been sold, mainly to U.S. buyers, as only one Canadian province - Quebec -permits it on its roads. It is, Mr. Clifford admits, a niche technology.

But the 46-year-old entrepreneur has much bigger plans. In 2004, Mr. Clifford signed a licence with Eestor, a Texas battery developer, that gives Zenn exclusive rights to use its technology in small and mid-size cars. Because Eestor's battery promises to propel a car up to 400 kilometres at highway speeds after just a five-minute charge, the deal could have a massive upside: Mr. Clifford envisions "Zennergy" electric propulsion systems powering millions of new and old vehicles. "We want Zennergy drives to be ubiquitous with electric-drive cars," he says. "We want to be the standard."

The downside? If Eestor's technology, still in development, proves unviable, Zenn could join Bricklin and Magna's Torrero in the annals of failed Canadian car brands.

Mr. Clifford is well aware of the gamble, but he's driven as much by ecological passion as business opportunity. In the mid-'90s, frustrated at being unable to buy an electric car in Canada, he bought a 1959 French electric car. "You'd park it and there'd be 20 people around it, staring and asking questions," he recalls.

Then, in 2000, two things happened: Mr. Clifford sold his Internet marketing business, and his beloved car broke down. He called the guy from whom he'd bought it to ask how to get it fixed, and was told, "Look in the Yellow Pages under 'lift trucks.' " As in forklifts. "That was the 'Aha!' moment," Mr. Clifford says. "There are millions of electric cars being driven behind closed doors in warehouses. This is proven, commercialized technology."

In 2002, Mr. Clifford ventured forth on two parallel streams. One was assembling a commercial, low-speed electric vehicle for neighbourhood driving, using the chassis of French Microcars. "I saw it as a low-capital-risk way to get a product to market" while establishing a brand and industry credibility, he says.

The second, more important stream was to develop a long-range, high-speed electric drive system that could power any car. "Consumers will not accept electric vehicles until they do exactly, or close to, what their gas-powered vehicles do," Mr. Clifford says. That means a charging time roughly equivalent to what it takes to fill up at the pump, the ability to operate in any climate, and near price parity.

The challenge turns primarily on battery technology, and the Zenn team investigated numerous options until it came across Eestor, an Austin-based startup whose prototype ceramic "ultracapacitor" promised to provide 10 times the energy of existing batteries at one-tenth the weight.

"It was a completely disruptive, breakthrough technology," Mr. Clifford says. "It replaces petroleum - it has that capacity." But the tech was still untried. To raise development funding, Eestor offered licences covering rights for various applications, from automotive to industrial to military. Zenn paid $2.5-million for rights covering small to mid-size cars, then in April invested another $2.5-million in the company.

Earth2Tech reports that EEStor has signed another customer for its ultracapacitor technology, an electric bike manufacturer - EEStor to Super Charge Electric Bikes.

We still haven’t seen exactly how secretive EEStor’s ambiguously named Electrical Energy Storage Unit (EESU) works, but the Cedar Park, Texas-based startup has been racking up the technology partners. Light Electric Vehicles Company (LightEVs) says it has signed an exclusive agreement with EEStor to use the EESU in two- and three-wheeled vehicles. This follows partnerships with military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin and electric car maker ZENN. EEStor is aiming to start commercial production of its EESUs sometime in 2009, though its not clear which partners will get first dibs.

According to the Eugene, Ore.-based LightEV’s website, it is working on electric propulsion systems for electric bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheeled vehicles, which will be built in partnership with existing manufacturers and under its own brands. John Stephens, Executive Vice President, said in the release that LightEVs plans to use EEStor’s technology to make an electric bicycle with a 100 mile range and is considering developing a three-wheel, two-passenger electric vehicle with a range of up to 500 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 85 mph. Impressive sounding, but we’re still waiting for details on how the technology exactly works and performs.

LightEVs describes EEStor’s technology as a “multilayered barium titanate ceramic capacitor,” and the company has said its units are based on “ultra capacitor architecture.” EEStor expects its technology to provide 10 times the energy of lead-acid batteries at one tenth the weight and half the price.

Technology Review has a look at a new development in ultracapacitor research - Nanoflowers Improve Ultracapacitors.

Imagine a cell-phone battery that recharges in a few seconds and that you would never have to replace. That's the promise of energy-storage devices known as ultracapacitors, but at present, they can store only about 5 percent as much energy as lithium-ion batteries. An advance by researchers at the Research Institute of Chemical Defense, in China, could boost ultracapacitors' ability to store energy.

A capacitor consists of two electrodes with opposite charges, often separated by an insulator that keeps electrons from jumping directly between them. The researchers have developed an electrode that can store twice as much charge as the activated-carbon electrodes used in current ultracapacitors. The new electrode contains flower-shaped manganese oxide nanoparticles deposited on vertically grown carbon nanotubes.

The electrodes deliver five times as much power as activated-carbon electrodes, says Hao Zhang, lead author of the Nano Letters paper describing the new work. The electrode's longevity also compares with that of activated-carbon electrodes, Zhang says: discharging and recharging the electrodes 20,000 times reduced the capacitor's energy-storage capacity by only 3 percent.

In a typical ultracapacitor, two aluminum electrodes are suspended in an electrolyte. A voltage applied to the electrodes separates the positive and negative ions in the electrolyte, which get attracted to the oppositely charged electrodes. How much energy the ultracapacitor can store largely depends on the electrodes' surface area: the more area, the more space to store charge. Coating the electrodes with activated carbon increases their surface area, since a teaspoonful of the porous, spongelike material has about the surface area of a football field. Ultracapacitors can store millions of times more energy than the tiny capacitors used in electronic circuits.

But their performance still pales beside that of batteries, which store energy using chemical reactions. "If I gave you a cell phone with an ultracapacitor battery, you'd never replace the battery, and you could recharge it in a few seconds, but it would only last half an hour," says Joel Schindall, an electrical-engineering professor at MIT.

So far, ultracapacitors have been limited to niche applications that require high power and quick, repetitive recharging. For example, the devices provide quick bursts of power to buses, trucks, and light-rail trains over short stretches, and braking replenishes them. If they could store more energy, however, they could be a powerful, long-lasting replacement for batteries in hybrid-electric vehicles and portable electronics.

AutoBlogGreen has a look at the new Puegeot dhybrid diesel racing car - Peugeot shows new 908 HY diesel-hybrid Le Mans racer!.

In the current world of big time international endurance racing, two cars stand head and shoulders above the rest, the Audi R10 TDI and the Peugeot 908 HDi. Put these two Le Mans Prototype class 1 cars, both powered by 5.5L turbo diesel V12s, on a wide open track and nothing can run with them. With Formula 1 introducing hybrid kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) in 2009 and the American Le Mans Series introducing a Green Challenge award, Peugeot has decided to take the next step with its program.

The French manufacturer is using the last race of the 2008 Le Mans Series at Sliverstone to unveil a demonstrator called the 908 HY which may foreshadow the next generation of its Le Mans challenger. The 908 HY adds a 60 kW electric motor, a set of lithium ion battery packs and corresponding power electronics. The diesel hybrid system will allow the car to operate in electric-only mode in the pits, and get a power boost on the track thanks to recaptured kinetic energy.

After Gutenberg reports that Toyota is trialling a plug-in hybrid in the UK - EDF Energy and Toyota launch UK trials of Plug-in Hybrid Vehicle.

EDF Energy and Toyota have teamed up to road trial the first Plug-in Hybrid Vehicle (PHV) introduced by a car manufacturer to the UK. Toyota's right-hand drive PHV will make its on-the-road debut as part of EDF Energy's company fleet and will be tested by employees under every-day driving conditions.

The results are expected to play a pivotal role in the development of Toyota's PHV technology, which represents a further improvement on Toyota's hybrid technology.

After Gutenberg is also celebrating the arrival of some electric motorcycles - Finally! Electric Motorcycles from Honda and Yamaha.



JCWinnie also has a post at The Energy Collective, on the rollout in Berlin of EV charging points - Berlin soon to have 100+ EVs, 500 Charging Points

Daimler is joining forces with RWE, one of the largest energy providers, to create a network of electric cars and charging stations in Berlin. According to a Daimler press release via EVWorld Newswire, “the payment system takes the form of the exchange of data between a special in-car communication system and the intelligent charging point.” ...

An important innovation of the “e-mobility Berlin” project is the lithium-ion battery developed specifically for the use in these cars. Compared to conventional batteries, the large format, advanced lithium battery pack and battery management system initially developed for the Ultra-Low Carbon Car Challenge project by Lithium Technology Corporation, together with Zytek and I+ME, provides a greater range and a shorter charging time.

More controversial is the V2G (Vehicle 2 Grid) potential. When electric vehicles are connected to charging stations and local demand to the network is high, then electricity from the on-board lithium-ion packs could be fed back into the network. With communication already in place between the cars and the network operator, at the very least charging of the vehicles could be slowed or stopped when demand for electricity is highest.

Cleantech.com reports that Maxwell Technologies has signed a deal to provide ultracapacitors for use in electric lift trucks - Maxwell Tech, Plug Power in fuel cell deal.

Plug Power will use Maxwell's ultracapacitors in its line of GenDrive fuel cells for electric lift trucks.

San Diego-based Maxwell Technologies said today that it signed a deal to supply its Boostcap ultracapacitors to Latham, N.Y.'s Plug Power. Maxwell said Plug Power will use the ultracapacitors in its line of GenDrive fuel cell power units.

Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed. The ultracapacitors are scheduled to be delivered during the third and fourth quarters.

"Integrating Maxwell's ultracapacitors into our fuel cell systems enhances the value of our GenDrive product for our customers," said Andy Marsh, president and CEO of Plug Power. "Ultracapacitors' burst power capabilities for lifting, as well as regenerative braking for energy recuperation and longer operating life make them an ideal complement to hydrogen fuel cells in this application."

EETimes reports that Maxwell are also selling ultracapacitors for use in energy storage in wind farms - Ultracapacitor to supply backup power in wind turbine system.

Boosting its expansion in the growing wind energy industry, Maxwell Technologies Inc. has announced that LTi REEnergy GmbH (LTi), a producer of electromechanical wind turbine blade pitch control systems, has selected Maxwell's BOOSTCAP ultracapacitors to supply backup power for LTi's PitchMaster blade pitch control system.

The LTi PitchMaster system will incorporate multi-cell BOOSTCAP ultracapacitor modules based on Maxwell's BCAP0350 "D cell" product. The ultracapacitors supply backup power for orderly system shutdown in the event of a main system power failure.

LTi chose the ultracapacitors over batteries for backup power for several reasons: longer operating life, lower maintenance requirements and higher reliability operation in harsh climates. The company said the BOOSTCAP products have demonstrated reliability over the temperature range of -40°C to 65°C.

The Guardian has an interesting article on available lithium supplies that could be used in electric car batteries - What is going to power our cars ?.

It wasn't the sound of his car engine that was distracting Ian Clifford. The chief executive of Canadian business Zenn Motors makes electric vehicles that give off no noise. He was worried that the obvious choice to power his next car - the same stuff that goes into laptops and cellphone batteries - was going to be in short supply.

"If you look at the increase in lithium prices over the past seven to 10 years, it's been dramatic," says Clifford. Zenn's short-range urban cars traditionally used nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, but his next vehicle - an 80mph model with a 250-mile range - needed more efficiency. "There are very limited global reserves, and they're in potentially very unstable parts of the world," adds Clifford.

Supplies under strain

The US moved the previously obscure chemical element to centre stage in the 1950s when its lithium-hungry H-bomb programme kickstarted world production. The rising popularity of lithium-ion (Li-Ion) in batteries has sent demand soaring again, and pundits now worry that electric cars will strain our supplies.

Your laptop might use six finger-sized Li-Ion cells in its battery, but US-based Tesla Motors bolts together 6,000 cells to power one of its high-end electric sports cars. Now others, drawn to Li-Ion's light weight and high capacity, are joining in. Toyota's Prius hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) runs on a small battery powered by braking energy that switches to petrol when it runs out. The group will switch its Nickel Metal Hydrid (NiMH) chemistry to Li-Ion in 2010. GM will be putting Li-Ion batteries in the Volt, its plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) due out the same year. Other vendors also promise PHEVs, which are similar to HEVs, but with a larger, plug-in battery. Many will take the Li-Ion approach.

So how much lithium do we have? 1m tonnes of lithium metal is used to produce 5.3m tonnes of lithium carbonate, says Brian Jaskula, an analyst at the US Geological Survey (USGS), which goes into Li-Ion batteries.

Data from USGS puts total world resources of lithium metal at around 14m tonnes. The total world resource includes all the lithium metal we know about, whether it is commercially viable to extract it or not. But the USGS data is based on a 1976 National Research Council report.

A lot has changed in 32 years. Back then, most lithium came from a mineral called spodumene. But in 2001 SQM, a large mining group, began producing it in huge volumes by extracting it from salars - salt flats through which water has leached. The cheaper process sent prices plummeting and put many spodumene mines out of business.

"That was the last time that an organisation got together to do that type of research," Jaskula notes. But now two independent researchers are hoping to update the facts. In the pessimist corner is William Tahil, research director at Meridian International Research, who predicted two years ago that demand for lithium in cars would outpace supply. "There is no surplus lithium carbonate available for the automotive market. It's all being used by existing industrial applications," he says.

His report provoked a rebuttal from retired industry veteran Keith Evans, who worked on the original 1976 report. In March, he released An Abundance of Lithium, claiming a world resource of 28m tonnes, almost half of which he says could be extracted commercially (worldlithium.com). This would produce nearly 74m tonnes of lithium carbonate. "Tahil's argument that the world is short of lithium carbonate is wrong," Evans says. Two months later, Tahil released an even more pessimistic report, claiming that economically viable lithium metal reserves were just 4m tonnes. Evans is due to respond with a further rebuttal soon. Who is correct?

"Tahil considers that the total world lithium reserves are 4m tonnes," says an insider at SQM, which produces 37% of the world's lithium carbonate. "However, SQM's proven and probable in situ reserves alone total 5m tonnes."

Tahil, who still stands behind another report he wrote in 2006 claiming that the World Trade Center was felled by underground nuclear explosions, also dismisses the potential extraction of lithium from hectorite, a type of clay. But Western Uranium Corporation, a Canadian group, is testing recovery methods that it says could be worth 2m tonnes of lithium. Tahil has also largely dismissed the option of recycling lithium carbonate from Li-Ion batteries.

Disagreements over lithium reserves aside, the other debate is about how much lithium we can produce from our reserves, and whether it can match the growth of the car industry. ...

Peak oil advocates will worry that in spite of Kumar's analysis, we'll be forced to embrace Li-Ion in the coming years because oil will simply run out. But Bill van Amburg of research organisation Weststart-Calstart says that lithium won't have to support the auto industry on its own. "You'll have more efficient cars, alternative fuel, blended fuel, then the hybrids and electric drives, and all of them will have their piece of the wedge," he says.

Zenn and EEstor continue to get much of the press for electric cars lately - Tyler Hamilton has another article on them up at Technology Review - Better Batteries Charge Up.

A Texas startup says that it has taken a big step toward high-volume production of an ultracapacitor-based energy-storage system that, if claims hold true, would far outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market.

Dick Weir, founder and chief executive of EEStor, a startup based in Cedar Park, TX, says that the company has manufactured materials that have met all certification milestones for crystallization, chemical purity, and particle-size consistency. The results suggest that the materials can be made at a high-enough grade to meet the company's performance goals, as well as withstand the extreme voltages needed for high energy storage, the company said in a press release last week.

"These advancements provide the pathway to meeting our present requirements," Weir says. "This data says we hit the home run."

EEStor claims that its system, called an electrical energy storage unit (EESU), will have more than three times the energy density of the top lithium-ion batteries today. The company also says that the solid-state device will be safer and longer lasting, and will have the ability to recharge in less than five minutes. Toronto-based ZENN Motor, an EEStor investor and customer, says that it's developing an EESU-powered car with a top speed of 80 miles per hour and a 250-mile range. It hopes to launch the vehicle, which the company says will be inexpensive, in the fall of 2009.

But skepticism in the research community is high. At the EESU's core is a ceramic material consisting of a barium titanate powder that is coated with aluminum oxide and a type of glass material. At a materials-research conference earlier this year in San Francisco, it was asked whether such an energy-storage device was possible. "The response was not very positive," said one engineering professor who attended the conference. ...

Weir says that EEStor's latest production milestones lay the foundation for what follows. It has taken longer than originally expected, he says, but the company is now in a position to deploy more-advanced technologies for the production of military-grade applications, alluding to EEStor's partnership with Lockheed Martin.

Weir says that momentum is building and that he'll start coming out with information about the company's progress on a "more rapid basis." Plans are also under way for a major expansion of EEStor's production lines. "There's nothing complex in this," he says, pointing to his past engineering days at IBM. "It's nowhere near the complexity of disk-drive fabrication."

Despite its critics, EEStor has won support from some significant corners. In addition to Lockheed Martin, venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is an investor, and former Dell Computer chairman Morton Topfer sits on EEStor's board.

The company is also in serious talks with potential partners in the solar and wind industry, where EEStor's technology can, according to Weir, help put 45 percent more energy into the grid. He says that the company is working toward commercial production "as soon as possible in 2009," although when asked, he gave no specific date. "I'm not going to make claims on when we're going to get product out there. That's between me and the customer. I don't want to tell the industry."

Dahn says that he hopes EEStor will succeed. "I hope it works like a charm, because it will be a lot easier than fuel cells and batteries if it comes to pass."

Another high profile ultracapacitor manufacturer is Maxwell technologies, who Cleantech.com reports have landed a contract with a Chinese hybrid bus company - Golden Dragon Bus to use Maxwell ultracapacitors

Golden Dragon is producing diesel-electric hybrid buses for the Hangzhou, China, Public Transport Group. San Diego-based Maxwell Technologies made a deal to supply its Boostcap ultracapacitors to Xiamen, China's Golden Dragon Bus. Golden Dragon is producing diesel-electric hybrid buses for the Hangzhou, China, Public Transport Group.

Maxwell said today that it has completed delivery of 720 of its 48-volt multi-cell ultracapacitor modules to Golden Dragon for installation into 45 hybrid buses. Financial terms of the supply contract were not disclosed.

Green Car Congress reports the Th!nk City electric car has appeared at a show in London - TH!NK city Debuts in UK.

The TH!NK city electric vehicle made its debut at the 2008 British International Motor Show in London. The two-seater urban car has a top speed of 65 mph and a range of 126 miles in city driving on a single charge. Charging the batteries from 20% capacity to 80% takes four hours.

The TH!NK city accelerates from zero to 30 mph in 6.5 seconds and to 50 mph in 16 seconds. It requires just an overnight top-up of electricity and can travel for 126 miles in city driving on a fully charged battery.

Production started this year in Norway, and the first batch of right-hand drive cars will be delivered to UK customers in summer 2009. Prices of the TH!NK city will be announced closer to the on-sale date.

The TH!NK city is the sixth-generation electric vehicle that has been produced in Norway. Series production of the newly designed TH!NK city car recently started and the first cars have been delivered to Norwegian customers. Currently, cars are being produced at a rate of three to five a day, rising to 20 a day in the next six months.

The capacity of Think’s first assembly plant in Aurskog, outside Oslo, is presently being increased to 10,000 cars per year. Think plans to increase its production capacity with new assembly plants in the USA, Continental Europe and Asia in the next two years.

Joel Makower has a look at some of the adjustments that need to be made to support large scale rollouts of plugin hybrids - GM and the New Plug-In Infrastructure.

This week's announcement by General Motors that it has joined with more than 30 utility companies across the U.S. to work on issues related to electric vehicles got a great deal of media play. But the coverage only began to scratch the surface of the complexity of bringing plug-in electric vehicles to market in mass quantities.

In reality, the GM-utility conversation isn't entirely new. It began in January, at a Vehicle Electrification Workshop held at GM's research center in Warren, Michigan. I had the privilege of attending the meeting, which was facilitated by my colleagues at the sustainability strategy firm GreenOrder. The meeting included more than two dozen utility executives, including a team from the Electric Power Research Institute, the industry-funded consortium that served as the co-convener of the meeting.

It was an eye-opener, to say the least. It turns out that building the infrastructure for the plug-in electric vehicle isn't simply a matter of, "Here's a plug, here's a socket. End of story."

First of all, not everyone has a socket — a secure place to park their car and recharge it. Those living in apartment buildings, for example, lack this ability. Even where a plug exists, it may not have sufficient amperage to handle the load. (I'm a good example: I have a socket in my garage, but it's on the same circuit as my bedroom. If you plug in a power-hungry appliance in the garage, TiVo gets grumpy.)

But that's the least of it. Building the plug-in infrastructure involves a mind-numbing array of technical challenges. Among them ...

The Boston Herald reports that rising fuel costs are forcing police departments to increase the use of foot and bike patrols and to shift to electric vehicles - Police: rising fuel costs are ‘major public safety issue’. Coming soon - the Tesla Patrol Car.

Municipal police departments, which must run 24-hour fleets on $4-a-gallon gas, are charging extra for cruisers at traffic details, increasing bicycle and motorcycle patrols, and putting electric-powered vehicles into commission, a Herald review has found.

A Herald survey of the state’s largest police forces found that cops are being asked to morph into fuel-efficient crime fighters while gas costs gobble tens of thousands of dollars in law enforcement cash.

“The whole fuel thing is a major public safety issue. It’s a major economic issue,” said Framingham police Chief Steven B. Carl. “We put cops in very specific areas to keep them from driving around a lot and to be more efficient. You just can’t get away from answering calls. Most people don’t have accidents or commit crimes in areas that are convenient to police.”

And finally, EcoGeek reports that the Tata Nano may be going electric too - The Tata Nano: World's Cheapest (Electric) Car? . It sounds like they are talking about the (very) long awaited air car.

So it looks like the world's cheapest car (the Tata Nano) could soon be the world's cheapest electric car as well.

The price of the Nano is just above $2,500 and Tata's chairman Ratan Tata says he expects demand to exceed supply. Tata's plant in the city of Singur in the state of West Bengal will eventually have the capacity to make 350,000 Nanos a year.

Tata Motors plans to make a second generation of its four-passenger Nano with a diesel engine. But initially, it will have a gasoline engine capable of 50 miles to the gallon.

But the interesting news out of Mr. Tata's talk to shareholders at the annual general meeting last week was that the company is competing for an Eco car in Thailand and looking at other ways to make even more fuel-efficient versions of the Nano.

Tata is working with a French firm in developing an electric Nano. The electric car will use compressed air. Tata Motors also announced earlier this year it is in talks with Chrysler on developing electric vehicles.

Tyler at Clean Break has a post on EEStor and the mysterious blogger who tracks their every move (behind the curtain of secrecy that they have erected) - Mystery blogger offers insight into secretive EEStor. The blog in question is "EEStor Ultracapacitors: Battery Revolution begins with Electric Cars" which is a little too enthusiastic in its promotion of EEStor and Zenn for my taste. When they release an actual product and we get to see if it works, then great - but it could all too easily just be a way of pumping Zenn stock at this point.

There's no shortage of speculation about EEStor Inc., the Texas-based energy storage company that claims it will change the world with its super-dooper, disruptive, "this changes everything" ultracapactor. But one anonymous blogger has been digging around and is managing to piece together a decent -- although not necessarily accurate -- picture of what's going on at the secretive company. Some have accused this blogger of being Dick Weir, EEStor's media-loathing founder and CEO, or Ian Clifford, CEO and founder of ZENN Motor Co., which is a minority owner in EEStor and has exclusive license to use its technology in certain vehicle applications. But the blogger in question attempted to clear the air today, pointing out he's not an employee of EEStor or ZENN, has no friends at the companies or special relationships. He's just an average joe -- in the D.C. area, I have learned -- interested in the technology and who likes to dig around. A ZENN stock pumper? Impossible to know. But if you're to believe the posting, he seems to be having more success than professional journalists like me. One financial analyst, who has access to EEStor, told me Dick Weir talks to this blogger because, "It amuses him. He gets a kick out of it." There you go.

So what's the latest poop on EEStor from blogger central? You can read it here if you're interested. Some of the points raised I've heard as well, but haven't been able to nail down as fact. But if you're to believe what you read, EEStor is almost done its Web sites, has filed 21 new patents, and is putting a plan together to raise capital that would go toward a seven-fold expansion of its current pilot production line. Apparently the long-awaited permeativity tests, not yet released, have been known for some time. Dick Weir is simply choosing to release the results at the same time as putting up the new Web site and announcing the new patent filings. At which time, he'll be prepared -- and more accepting of -- the flood of questions from media and investors. Can't wait. Certainly, the aim here is to raise a whack of capital, perhaps using ZENN's stock, in reaction to this frenzy, as a proxy for the market value of EEStor.

EEstor's ultracapacitor technology seems to have been on the verge of being released for years now. The Calgary Herald reports that we may not have to wait too much longer to see if it is real - Zenn and the art of electric batteries.

Like other companies selling alternative transportation in an oil-dependent world, Toronto-based Zenn has suddenly become a sexy stock. Its shares have gained 81 per cent over the past three months on the Toronto Venture Exchange despite the fact the company has yet to post a profit.

Thing is, Zenn could soon be much more than sexy. It could be downright disruptive, turning the automotive industry on its head.

Sometime over the next several weeks, a privately held and ultra-secretive company named EEStor Inc., based in Cedar Park, Texas, is expected to release the results of independent third-party testing of its electrical-energy storage unit, which aims to replace the electrochemical batteries we now use in everything from hybrid cars to laptop computers. EEStor says its system, combining battery and ultra-capacitor technology and based on modified barium titanate ceramic powder, could power a car for 400 kilometres with regular performance. It claims the unit would charge in a few minutes and weigh less than 10 per cent of current lead-acid batteries for the same cost.

If it is proven to work, EEStor, and its equity and business partners, including Zenn and U.S. defence contractor Lockheed Martin Corp., will have a technology that could change the transportation industry, with implications for renewable energy and any sector that needs electrical energy storage technology. ...

EEStor has said it expects its technology to be commercially ready within six months. "This is not small potatoes here. If this works, it really changes the transportation sector," says Massimo Fiore, an analyst with Versant Partners in Montreal.

Jim at The Energy Blog remains somewhat skeptical about the latest news on EEStor.

EEStor is believed to have had trouble developing its product, an ultracapacitor claimed to have a specific energy of 280 watt-hours per kilogram, compared to a lithium ion battery with about 120 watt-hours and a lead-acid gel battery, with only 32 watt hours. (Although ElectroVaya claims 330Wh/kg, so they may not be alone)

The problem is believed, by some, to be in producing the ultra-pure barium-titanate used in the capacitor, which is the key to having the high specific energy. A January 2007 announcement indicated that 1) An automated production line had been proven to meet the requirements for precise chemical delivery, purity control, parameter control and stability and 2) they had completed the initial milestone of certifying purification, concentration, and stability of all of its key production chemicals notably the attainment of 99.9994% purity of its barium nitrate powder. At that time they claimed that they would be shipping product to Zenn in 2007, a year earlier than indicated in the current announcement.

EEStor's recently announced collaboration with Lockheed Martin, which gives the company credibility and is a further indication that the company is making progress. The current announcement seems to be in agreement with the timing indicated in the Lockheed Martin announcement, although, based on past performance, a wait and see position must be held.