EEStor Inc.'s Invention Could Supplant Car Batteries

A Texas company could be on the road to commercially producing a device that allows electric vehicles to charge in minutes and drive for hundreds of miles.

EEStor Inc., of Cedar Park, Texas, has developed Electrical Energy Storage Units (EESU), which it said can compete against all existing battery technologies. The "ultracapacitor" will first be used by Zenn Motor, a Toronto-based company that bought the rights to the technology in 2005.

EEStor was supposed to begin shipping the ultracapacitors for use in Zenn's low-speed electric cars this year. Zenn bought rights to the technology in 2005.

CNET reported in a blog last week that commercial production of the ultracapacitor had been pushed back. "'We intend to be in production on or before the middle of next year,'" Co-founder Richard D. Weir told CNET in a brief interview.

According to the Associated Press, the secret behind the technology is a material sandwiched between thousands of layers of paper-thin metal sheets. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move across the proprietary material, resulting in a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly unlike batteries, which rely on chemical reactions to store energy and can take hours to store and release energy.

The company’s founders, Weir and Carl Nelson, are two IBM veterans who worked on disk-storage technology in the 1990s. Zenn has invested $3.8 million in EEStor while venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers invested $3 million, the AP reported

In January, EEStor said it had overcome several prerequisites for production, such as meeting requirements for chemical delivery and purity control and certifying the purification and stability of its key production chemicals. It had started to work toward powder purification.

“We are very proud of the key advancements we have made over the past year,” Weir said in a statement in January. “In addition to the milestones identified, the company has also been awarded a critical patent related to our technology and has 12 additional patents pending. We have built a state-of-the-art facility and have exceptional personnel onboard."