Charge in 5 minutes, Drive 500 miles?

ctroutwi writes "In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."

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More details..

[stoney27]

There are some good details on this technology on Energy blog

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/01/ eestor_ultracap.html

A breif run down:

• It is a parallel plate capacitor with barium titanate as the dielectric.
• It claims that it can make a battery at half the cost per kilowatt-hour and one-tenth the weight of lead-acid batteries.
• As of last year selling price would start at $3,200 and fall to $2,100 in high-volume production
• The product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours.
• The batteries fully charge in minutes as opposed to hours.
• The EEStor technology has been tested up to a million cycles with no material degradation compared to lead acid batteries that optimistically have 500 to 700 recharge cycles,
• Because it's a solid state battery rather than a chemical battery, such being the case for lithium ion technology, there would be no overheating and thus safety concerns with using it in a vehicle.
• With volume manufacturing it's expected to be cost-competitive with lead-acid technology.
• As of last year, EEStor planned to build its own assembly line to prove the battery can work and then license the technology to manufacturers for volume production
• EEStor's technology could be used in more than low-speed electric vehicles. The company envisions using it for full-speed pure electric vehicles, hybrid-electrics (including plug-ins), military applications, backup power and even large-scale utility storage for intermittent renewable power sources such as wind and solar.
• They have an exclusive agreement with Feel Good Cars, a Canadian manufacturer of the ZENN, a low speed electric car, to to purchase high-power-density ceramic ultra capacitors called Electrical Storage Units (ESU). FGC's exclusive worldwide right is for all personal transportation uses under 15 KW drive systems (equivalent to 100 peak horse power) and for vehicles with a curb weight of under 1200 kilograms not including batteries.

-S