Those of you have have been following the EEStor saga will want to check out this new article in Technology Review and this blog post, both by Tyler Hamilton. Seems EEStor founder and CEO Dick Weir is finally starting to open up to the press, and he reports that things are on schedule for commercial production in 2009.
If you don’t recall, EEStor is working on a solid-state supercapacitor — an electrical energy storage unit , or EESU — that will store three times more power than the best lithium-ion batteries on the market, charge in five minutes, last longer, discharge faster, and enable up to a 250 mile range. They’ve got contracts with ZENN Motors and Lockheed-Martin (apparently the recent year’s delay was to increase their standards to enable mission-critical applications, likely military).
If EEStor does what it says, it will have produced a truly disruptive technology, enabling everything from cheap, long-range electric vehicles to large-scale grid storage for renewable energy. Everybody in the cleantech world is trying not to get too excited. As Weir talks more, we should be able to get a better sense of how seriously to take it.
