Next Gen Energy Storage | Green Energy News

August 1, 2004 – Vol.9 No.19

NEXT GEN ENERGY STORAGE?

The key to the technological success of advanced vehicle technologies, such as hybrids, may be energy storage. The energy lost in braking can be recaptured, stored and used again. Stored energy also allows for a smaller than expected conventional engine to be used in a vehicle. The energy storage device, battery pack or ultracapacitor, provides peak power energy for the electric drive system for acceptable acceleration and hill climbing.

A new report, Advanced Energy Storage Technologies, from market consultants Frost and Sullivan says the following:

"Environmentally friendly technologies such as flywheels and ultracapacitors, also called supercapacitors, may soon get a lot more consideration in the energy storage markets.

"Ultracapacitors have close to 100 percent efficiency and can be recycled up to 500,000 times. The introduction of standard battery-sized ultracapacitors is a move that has the potential to significantly improve market acceptance of ultracapacitors in a variety of applications, including hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs).

"Until now, the biggest hindrance to ultracapacitor mass adoption has been the high cost of integrating them into designs. However, the standard sizing offers an economic power delivery device for seamless and rapid integration into a variety of applications. These ultracapacitors can be produced at half the cost of the earlier version and the savings are likely to be passed on to original equipment manufacturers."

Well said.

Already Honda’s limited production (very limited) fuel cell vehicle, the FCX, uses ultracapacitors for energy storage. More applications are on the way.

Maxwell Technologies and ISE Research have announced that Maxwell's BOOSTCAP (tm) ultracapacitors will be used in 17 hybrid drive systems being built by ISE for buses to be used by a Northern California transit agency. The ISE hybrid drive system, known as ThunderVolt (tm), consists of a Ford V-10 gasoline engine, Siemens electric motors, generators and controls, and an energy storage system known as ThunderPack II (tm) that uses 288 Maxwell ultracapacitors.

ISE considers ThunderPack II to be so reliable that it is offering a five-year warranty on the system.

A summary of Frost and Sullivan’s Energy Vertical Subscription Service, which provides an introduction to their analysis of Advanced Energy Storage Technologies, can be obtained by contacting Kristina Menzefricke at kristina.menzefricke@frost.com (include full company and contact information)

Visit Maxwell at http://www.maxwell.com/ and ISE Research at http://www.isecorp.com/ .