Waiting on EEStor - holding our breath
seanseamour on March 12 2008 at 3:57 am | Filed under: EEStor
After the January announcement of the marketing agreement with Lockheed Martin, news bits from Zenn announcing a performance upgrade for their electric vehicles, Forbes actually published a picture of the long awaited “arlesienne”
Perhaps more interesting yet is the performances announced in the Forbes articleby Melanie Linder “EEStor says it solved that problem using a ceramic ultracapacitor with a barium-titanate insulator that can absorb higher amounts of energy per given unit of mass (called specific energy). According to the company, EEStor’s batteries boast specific energy of 280 watt-hours per kilogram, whereas a lithium ion battery has about 120 watt-hours and a lead-acid gel battery, commonly used in golf carts and motor scooters, has only 32 watt hours”
But this is just one of the news bits, even if much appears as updates of previous articles, MIT’s Technology Review has an interesting article publishes on January 22nd :
“A New Deal for EEStor. A delayed battery technology may indeed be on the way”
We are all holding our breath but to add to the excitement Popular Mechanics published yesterday an article relating to research under way at MIT on what appears to be yet another approach to advanced ultracapacitors, I refer you to “MIT Builds Efficient Nanowire Storage to Replace Car Batteries“.
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jan |
update
EEStor : the next paradigm shift?
Is if for real? The bold claims about a new ultracapacitor technology rendering the battery to an object of the past has nurtured more and more scepticicsm as milestones were left behind. We watched Zenn Motors re-engine to turtle speed it’s PEV launch… we had almost forgotten EEStor, then as we reported last week, out of the blue Lockheed Martin jumped into the fray to secure exclusive rights for defense and homeland security applications and this morning Zenn Motors is all of a sudden announcing plans for remotorization of its PEV to intitially announced specs.
MIT’ Technology Review “A New Deal for EEStor, a delayed battery technology may indeed be on the way” adds another layer of comfort today, rehashing a lot of what we know but with some bells and whistles that could spell the words “for real”; as a teaser we will borrow from the article as follows : “ZENN chief executive Ian Clifford remains optimistic. “Every restatement of delivery time has been for good reasons,” he says, suggesting that the Lockheed announcement and the due diligence that led to it “add credibility to the technology.” He’s now expecting delivery of the energy-storage unit in mid-2008. And it won’t be a prototype, he emphasizes: it will be a mass-produced commercial product. “This is about commercialization, not hitting technology roadblocks. We’re in constant contact with EEStor, with regular visits to their site. We always come away from every meeting much more excited that this is going to happen.”
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