It looks increasingly likely that a tiny company in Texas may do the impossible. And in the process, the company could go a very long way to lessening our reliance on oil to power our cars. A market-ready, all-electric car may be available as soon as next year.
The EEStor company has been working for more than 10 years on an “ultracapacitor.” And what they’ve done is truly remarkable. Think of an ultracapacitor as a battery, the kind used to help power a hybrid like the Toyota Prius. But the ultracapacitor would bypass many of the problems inherent in large automotive batteries.
Big car batteries are heavy and bulky. They are chock full of toxic chemicals that are difficult to dispose of safely. Every time you recharge such a battery, it loses some of its capacity, so these batteries have to be made much larger than they need to be in order to have a useful life span. They are slow to charge up and don’t supply anything near the range you would get from a tank of gas.
Taken together, battery problems have been an impassable roadblock to the kind of plug-in electric cars that would allow us to greatly reduce our reliance on oil. The ultracapacitor is small and lightweight. It charges in minutes rather than hours. It is environmentally benign, and has much better range, so you could drive it farther without needing to charge up.
The battery problem is the only thing standing in the way of all-electric cars that could compete with gasoline-powered cars.
If all this sounds too good to be believed, many electrical engineers would agree with you. But in the last two years, EEStor’s device have been reaching energy storage capabilities that have caused many in the business and engineering world to revise their notion of what is possible.
One of EEStor’s very early investors was Toronto-based Zenn Motors, which holds the license to automotive uses of the ultracapacitor in United States and Canadian markets. Zenn is a small, all-electric car company that presently sells short-range, all-electric cars for fleet use on college campuses, parks and resorts.
Zenn has plans to make CityZenn, a street-legal, plug-in electric car powered by the ultracapacitor in late 2009. EEStor is in final stages of working out production methods. Of course, any engineer will tell you that it’s a very big step from a prototype to market-ready product. A 2009 release date may be overly optimistic.
Of course, a plug-in electric would use energy from electrical utilities, which burn coal to make power. So, an ultracapacitor would not have an immediate effect on global warming, but it would have a huge effect in reducing our need for oil. Just reducing the oil tanker traffic from oil-exporting countries to world oil markets would certainly be beneficial and would reduce the environmental risk posed by the manufacture and transport of oil.
Let’s hope EEStor can pull off the impossible.
