The Oil Drum

261 comments on DrumBeat: January 11, 2008

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xeroid on January 11, 2008 - 12:50pm

Oh! ... let's hope they have a viable product, available to the whole world, in the huge quantities required ... but, as usual for adequate alternatives to oil, they are not available yet (even to the military - who usually get stuff years before Joe Public.)

We have an urgent need for something like this - BTW ultra-capacitors are not new technology, but for any real capacity they are NOT low cost at present (low cost is the AIM of their R&D efforts and you shouldn't assume that they will actually be low cost when/if they finally hit the market (that doesn't matter for military applications maybe?) - there are many applications that need large amounts of energy in a short period of time (an example is intermittently used photocopiers that have to have their fuser rolls hot is one area I know quite a bit about.)

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bruce from chicago on January 11, 2008 - 1:10pm

Military contractors have a history of throwing money (they have a lot of it, thank you Mr. taxpayer!)at a technology even if there is less than a fifty/fifty chance of it working. Witness the huge amount of funds thrown at the “Star Wars” program. Most of these experimental programs show no results. An article for Technology Review, published by MIT, show there are a lot of scientists who are very skeptical this new battery will work. The comments are interesting, while the scientists cite papers and explain why they don’t think the Eestore device is viable, the other comments throw around platitudes and wishfull thinking as to why it will. Maybe a new way to measure the acceptance of the reality peak oil - peak platitudes.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/

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Black_Dog on January 11, 2008 - 1:47pm

There is an obvious military use for these high voltage devices. As noted in the interview:

......In the situation where you are trying to store energy, transport it without discharge obviously thats very attractive in the utility grid load leveling (situation). If your talking about powering for example a high energy weapon that requires a short burst of energy a capacitor is a great approach to do that....

...We are basically working with them exclusively and in the homeland security and defense department’s markets...

One of the big problems with laser weapons is the high energy requirements over a short period of time. If these ultra capacitors are as good as described, think of IR lasers mounted on Humvees. There was a story about such a scenario while back. The IR laser is invisible and the comment went something like "the bad guy was standing in a group talking with his buddies and suddenly his head exploded". Such systems would also be of use in airborne applications, including lasers to intercept incoming missiles. They would be used for delivering a series of rapid pulses, then could be recharged over a few minutes from lower power sources, such as an APU. Then too, there are the potential orbital applications...

E. Swanson