And can be recharged in just 5 minutes.

Am I dreaming again? But perhaps this one is more feasible than extracting energy from saltwater. And this one comes from Texas!

http://www.livescience.com/technology/070907_ap_electric_car.html


Battery-like Device Could Power Cars

By Grant Slater, Associated Press

posted: 07 September 2007 12:59 pm ET
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries,'' meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

"It's a paradigm shift,'' said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor's invention. "The Achilles' heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary.''

Clifford's company bought rights to EEStor's technology in August 2005 and expects EEStor to start shipping the battery replacement later this year for use in ZENN Motor's short-range, low-speed vehicles.

The technology also could help invigorate the renewable-energy sector by providing efficient, lightning-fast storage for solar power, or, on a small scale, a flash-charge for cell phones and laptops.

Skeptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.

"We've been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it,'' said Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics. "Depending on who you believe, they're at or beyond the limit of what is possible.''

EEStor's secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material.

The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

Batteries rely on chemical reactions to store energy but can take hours to charge and release energy. The simplest capacitors found in computers and radios hold less energy but can charge or discharge instantly. Ultracapacitors take the best of both, stacking capacitors to increase capacity while maintaining the speed of simple capacitors.

Hebner said vehicles require bursts of energy to accelerate, a task better suited for capacitors than batteries.

"The idea of getting rid of the batteries and putting in capacitors is to get more power back and get it back faster,'' Hebner said.

But he said nothing close to EEStor's claim exists today.

For years, EEStor has tried to fly beneath the radar in the competitive industry for alternative energy, content with a phone-book listing and a handful of cryptic press releases.

Yet the speculation and skepticism have continued, fueled by the company's original assertion of making batteries obsolete — a claim that still resonates loudly for a company that rarely speaks, including declining an interview with The Associated Press.

The deal with ZENN Motor and a $3 million investment by the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made big-payoff early bets on companies like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., hint that EEStor may be on the edge of a breakthrough technology, a "game changer'' as Clifford put it.

ZENN Motor's public reports show that it so far has invested $3.8 million in and has promised another $1.2 million if the ultracapacitor company meets a third-party testing standard and then delivers a product.

Clifford said his company consulted experts and did a "tremendous amount of due diligence'' on EEStor's innovation.

EEStor's founders have a track record. Richard D. Weir and Carl Nelson worked on disk-storage technology at IBM Corp. in the 1990s before forming EEStor in 2001. The two have acquired dozens of patents over two decades.

Neil Dikeman of Jane Capital Partners, an investor in clean technologies, said the nearly $7 million investment in EEStor pales compared with other energy storage endeavors, where investment has averaged $50 million to $100 million.

Yet curiosity is unusually high, Dikeman said, thanks to the investment by a prominent venture capital group and EEStor's secretive nature.

"The EEStor claims are around a process that would be quite revolutionary if they can make it work,'' Dikeman said.

Previous attempts to improve ultracapacitors have focused on improving the metal sheets by increasing the surface area where charges can attach.

EEStor is instead creating better nonconductive material for use between the metal sheets, using a chemical compound called barium titanate. The question is whether the company can mass-produce it.

ZENN Motor pays EEStor for passing milestones in the production process, and chemical researchers say the strength and functionality of this material is the only thing standing between EEStor and the holy grail of energy-storage technology.

Joseph Perry and the other researchers he oversees at Georgia Tech have used the same material to double the amount of energy a capacitor can hold. Perry says EEstor seems to be claiming an improvement of more than 400-fold, yet increasing a capacitor's retention ability often results in decreased strength of the materials.

"They're not saying a lot about how they're making these things,'' Perry said. "With these materials (described in the patent), that is a challenging process to carry out in a defect-free fashion.''

Perry is not alone in his doubts. An ultracapacitor industry leader, Maxwell Technologies Inc., has kept a wary eye on EEStor's claims and offers a laundry list of things that could go wrong.

Among other things, the ultracapacitors described in EEStor's patent operate at extremely high voltage, 10 times greater than those Maxwell manufactures, and won't work with regular wall outlets, said Maxwell spokesman Mike Sund. He said capacitors could crack while bouncing down the road, or slowly discharge after a dayslong stint in the airport parking lot, leaving the driver stranded.

Until EEStor produces a final product, Perry said he joins energy professionals and enthusiasts alike in waiting to see if the company can own up to its six-word promise and banish the battery to recycling bins around the world.

"I am skeptical but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong,'' Perry said.

Wow I hope this technology is for real and transforms our future! This is like a dream come true-and it sure sounds legit IMHO-I will try to get more info and keep up with this one.Thanks Joe

You're welcome Davidmac!

Consequently, here is a seemingly fitting technology that should perfectly match up with it. A Plan to build a recharging infrastructure in the entire country.


http://www.news.com/Reimagining-the-automobile-industry-by-selling-the-electricity/2100-11392_3-6215775.html?tag=cd.top

Reimagining the automobile industry by selling the electricity

Former SAP executive Shai Agassi wants to reinvent the auto industry by building car battery-charging stations around the world.
The New York Times
By John Markoff
Published: October 29, 2007, 7:57 AM PDT


Shai Agassi, a Silicon Valley technologist who was in competition to become chief executive of SAP, one of the world's largest software companies, has re-emerged with a grand plan to reinvent the world's automobile industry around battery-powered all-electric cars.

Others are developing green cars, like the Tesla and Chevrolet Volt. However, Agassi is not planning to make cars, but instead wants to deploy an infrastructure of battery-charging stations in the United States, Europe and the developing world.

The new system will sell electric fuel on a subscription basis and will subsidize vehicle costs through leases and credits.
Shai Agassi Shai Agassi

"We're basically saying this is just like the cellular-phone model," he said. "If you think of Tesla as the iPhone, we're AT&T."

On Monday, he plans to announce in New York that he has raised $200 million from private venture partners, including the Israel Corp., a large Israeli transportation and technology holding company, VantagePoint Venture Partners, as well as a group of private investors, including Edgar Bronfman Sr., the liquor magnate, and James D. Wolfensohn, former head of the World Bank. Israel Corp.'s $100 million investment was announced earlier this year.

In an interview Thursday, Agassi said tests of prototype vehicles would start in early 2008, and the company would begin commercial sales and service in two years. He said he was working to obtain commitments from both governments and carmakers.

Agassi founded TopTier software in Israel in 1992 and then moved the company to California. TopTier was acquired by SAP, based in Germany, in 2001.

He said his approach was a radical departure from other electric-car ventures that relied on advances in battery technology, which have come slowly.

Instead, he plans to extend the existing electric-power grids with a wide network of intelligent recharging stations in urban areas and supplementing it with a smaller number of automated battery replacement stations.

Today, giant automobile makers as well as start-ups like Silicon Valley's Tesla Motors are struggling with life cycle, performance and the cost limitations of battery technology. Tesla, for example, has been delayed several times by battery-related issues and now says it plans to deliver its first models next year.

General Motors has said it hopes to have advanced lithium ion battery technology in place to commercialize its planned Chevrolet Volt, but those batteries are still being developed.

There are also issues of safety with existing lithium ion batteries that have become unstable under extreme temperatures.

"If you listen to the car companies, they suggest there is a fix, but it's not there yet," said Stephen J. Girsky, a partner at the investment firm Centerbridge Partners who formerly served as an adviser to General Motors.

However, the new venture, which Agassi has named, for now, Project Better Place, would be viable, even with existing lithium ion battery technology, he said.

The economics will be more compelling in Europe, where gasoline is roughly twice as expensive as in the United States, he said. Assuming a life span of 1,500 battery recharges, he said the energy cost of all-electric cars would be about 7 cents a mile. That would be less than a third of the cost of driving a gasoline-powered car today.

"It's much easier to transport electrons than octane molecules," he said. "We've already got a grid that goes around the entire world; all we have to do is extend it."

Agassi envisions tens of thousands of recharging spots that will adjust for both cost and use patterns. For example, a group of parking-lot chargers at a workplace might recharge a visitor's car before a regular employee's car parked for the entire day.

The system will also supplement recharging stations that require about a minute of recharge time for every minute of driving, with a smaller number of car wash-style stations for swapping batteries. This would make it possible for a driver to go to a station rather than wait to recharge a battery, he said.