For those of you who don’t spend quite as much of your time reading about cleantech, I wanted to provide a couple of links that will help explain a rather dramatic development in the field.

Some history.

1. Battery technology is the single biggest engineering challenge facing the design of an electric car fit to be mass produced.  Batteries of the size that could power a 200-mile, 60 MPH car are typically either very bulky (hundreds of pounds), very expensive ($10,000 or more), and take extremely long to charge.



2. The current Toyota Prius uses lead-acid batteries.  Lead-acid technology does not have a high enough charge-to-weight ratio.  In order to make a 200-mile, 60 MPH electric car using lead-acid batteries you would have a very, very heavy battery.




3. The current Tesla Roadster uses lithium-ion batteries.  This is a much newer technology with a much higher energy density.  The charge-to-weight ratio of lithium-ion batteries is fair, but they are extremely expensive.  Lithium-ion batteries may potentially power the Chevy Volt, the most high-profile and mass-marketed electric vehicle.  They make sense as a choice of the $100,000 roadster but Chevy will have a difficult time selling the mid-market Volt for a reasonable price.



4. A capacitor is very different than a battery.  Capacitors can charge and discharge very quickly but can store very limited amounts of charge.



5. Research into the supercapacitor, a close cousin of the capacitor, has progressed very slowly.  Supercapacitors rely on a somewhat different electrical design and store more charge as a result.  This makes them potentially excellent candidates for the job of in-vehicle power source.  Theoretically, a supercapacitor could provide good acceleration, overall mileage, and charge time in a vehicle.


6. Unfortunately, while such a thing might be possible, many scientific questions needed to be answered before that become a reality.  This put the supercapacitor on the same clean energy wish-list as fusion.

So that, more or less, brings us to the present day.  A small company called EEStor (their page, wikipedia) has recently been working on a supercapacitor which is thought to be moving into production stages now.  They are contracted to provide batteries for upcoming models of Zenn’s vehicles, and Zenn is heavily relying on the advantages of their product to push future sales.  So much so, in fact, that they purchased a minority interest in EEStor.

EEStor is a very secretive company (much like another of my favorites) and they have created quite a rumor-monger following on the web.  Any small piece of news becomes a touchpoint of huge speculation; you can tell that some people are hanging their hopes for the future of humanity on this tiny company.  Just this past week, though, the first piece of real hard evidence came out of EEStor—a third party verified their technology and manufacturing processes.

It seems that we really, truly, may be about to see a switch from gas to electric.  Anyone else wish they worked for EEStor?