EEStor Promises Revolutionary Energy Storage Technology for Electric Cars

If you follow the growing electric car market you've almost certainly heard the term EEStor before. EEStor is a company out of Cedar Park, Texas that is claiming to have revolutionized energy storage.

In the most general terms EEStor's technology is a replacement for the chemical battery. It is a capacitor that allows for quickly storing large amounts of energy with a short charge time. If it comes to fruition this could eliminate both range and charge time issues for electric cars. Imagine a car that could travel 300 miles at highway speeds and could fully recharged in minutes. The technology also wouldn't have it's storage capacity degraged by deep cycling, time or temperature. Three problems with all current batteries.

EEStor holds about 20 patents with the US patent office (President & CEO Richard Weir is co-inventor on at least two of them), though to date no energy storage device using the capacitor technology has been demonstrated to the public nor verified to work from sources outside the company. EEStor's EESU (Electrical Energy Storage Unit) launch has been delayed from 2007 to 2008 and now 2009.

ZENN Motor Company, maker of the ZENN Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, is heavily invested in EEStor and owns nearly 11% of the company. Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested $3 million in the company in 2005 but there are no reports of further investments. Adding some validity to EEStor's claims, defense industry giant Lockheed-Martin signed an agreement for exclisve rights to the technology for military and homeland security use. To date Lockheed-Martin has not invested any money in the company.

ZENN has a lot of it's future invested in EEStor, the cityZENN is a highway capable electric car that will be among the first vehicles to use the EEStor system. With an approximate 250 mile range and 3 minute charge time it would completely revolutionize the electric car industry.