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One of the favorite parlor games among energy geeks for some time has been trying to figure out just what EEStor is up to. EEStor is the Texas-based company that has been making some very tantalizing claims about their ultracapacitor-based electricity storage units that will eventually be used in EVs. (See the Wiki machine for more on them, their claims, and their supporters/partners.)
We now have an interview with Dick Weir, EEStor’s CEO, in which he says:
- Their contract price with the ZENN car company is $100/kWh. He says that lithium batteries are currently around $350 to $1,200, a price I can neither confirm nor refute with the information I’ve been able to find.
- They will deliver prototypes to ZENN by the end of this year.
- “We’ve done our homework, and you’ll see the results when we get into 2010… you’ll see a very effective and constant ramp-up to our production capabilities.”
My take on this: I really hope everything works as well and as quickly as Weir predicts.
The $100/kWh price point is stunning, if they can deliver. A Civic-size EV can go roughly 4 miles/kWh (probably closer to 5), so an EEStor pack to power that size vehicle for 160 miles/charge will cost $4,000. If you’re redesigning a Civic or Corolla or something similar to convert it into an EV model, how much money do you think you save by eliminating the engine, transmission, exhaust system, cooling system, fuel tank, emissions equipment, etc.? It’s easily in the thousands, which means an EEStor-powered vehicle made by one of the major manufacturers would be very price competitive with the gasoline engine version.
At 4 miles/kWh and the average American retail price for electricity (9.28 cents/kWh), your fuel cost drops from roughly 10 cents/mile ($3 gasoline at 30 MPG) to 2.32 cents/mile. How many American multi-car households with easy access to overnight recharging do you think would be willing to replace one of their vehicles with this kind of EV? It would be in the millions, and that’s just counting the people who would want one just to “stick it to the oil companies”. (I’ve yet to find a spreadsheet function to calculate the marginal utility of “sticking it to the man”, by the way. Perhaps it will arrive in the next version of Excel or OpenOffice.)
All schedules for cutting edge product development should be taken with a fist-size chunk of salt, so I wouldn’t bet my keyboard on EEStor delivering those prototypes by December 31st. But if they’re anywhere close to that date–say, in the first half of 2010–that’s still gigantic news.
I suspect that if they prove to the world that their product is the real thing, meaning it has the price, performance, and scalability we’d all like to see, then one of the major car companies will buy them out and make Weir and his initial investors a boatload of cash. The car company that controlled this technology would have a staggering advantage in the EV technology race. Just the existence of this energy storage product would be enough to kill off hydrogen fuel cell development for cars and force a wholesale rewrite of predictions about how peak oil and climate chaos will play out.
Is EEStor a game changer? The only honest answer is that we simply don’t know for sure yet. The indications are increasingly suggestive that it will be, but until we have independently confirmed performance measurements and a demonstration of production capability on a useful scale, we shouldn’t assume anything. But more so than ever, EEStor deserves our continued attention.
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