EEStor’s Batteries Enlisted for Battlefield
EEStor, the much-talked about ceramic battery maker, has signed an exclusive international rights agreement with military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin to integrate EEStor’s Electric Energy Storage Units (EESUs) into military applications. This is a big win for the stealthy Cedar Park, Texas-based battery maker founded in 2001. EEStor’s claims of making a ceramic batteries that have 10 times the energy density of lead-acid batteries with 1/10th the weight and volume at half the price were met with a due amount of skepticism back in 2006. Since then the company has been tight-lipped about their potentially revolutionary technology.
The release from Lockheed (LMT) notes EEStor’s ambition of using their EESUs in renewable energy generation. “We’re building a high-tech battery that can do a helluva lot,” EEStor CEO Richard Weir told Earth2Tech flatly in a phone interview. “It sure can make wind and solar [energy] real,” he added. Weir declined to offer any other details about EEStor’s cleantech aspirations but it seems clear the energy storage company plans to make big moves in utility-level renewable power.
If EEStor’s EESU does everything they claim it can at the cost and size they cite, EEStor is poised to turn mobile energy on its head. Lockheed, stressing the goal of “energy independence for the Warfighter,” says it plans to put EEStor’s technology through the ultimate crash test: the battlefield. “The challenges and logistics of taking power onto the battlefield are significant,” Craig Vanbebber of Lockheed Martin told Earth2Tech this morning. They see EEStor’s highly efficient ESSUs solving a wide range of combat energy problems: “These could be as small as wearable power sources on soldiers to vehicular power sources to powering command and control centers,” Vanbebber explained.
EEStor also has Silicon Valley venture capitalist all-star firm Kleiner Perkins in its corner; it led a a $3 million preferred stock investment in the company back in the summer of 2005. The Lockheed agreement puts more pressure on EEStor to get its product to market. Last year EEStor was scheduled to start delivering the battery systems to Canadian electric carmaker ZENN Motors but in September pushed back commercial production dates to late 2008, which the Lockheed press release cites as the expected production date for its products.
We’ll see if the clandestine capacitor maker stays on schedule in ‘08. EEStor brings ceramic battery technology to the increasingly crowded utility-level energy storage space. Just last week, Deeya Energy, the maker of huge flow batteries, received $15 million to tackle the same problem. The competition among makers is good for renewable energy generators, who will be able to leverage these new technologies for more stable green power sources.
How long can we hold our breath on this one?
I see the move to military portable power (replacing batteries) as the first sign that large scale applications (such as PHEVs) of this technology are too expensive to make it to market.
Everyone wants to replace the heavy batteries (like the BA5590) that soldiers need to carry around by the handful to power their electronic gear. It’s a motivated customer willing to pay a high premium to solve this problem.
Millenium Cell tried to do the same thing when they finally figured out that storing Hydrogen with Boron was far too expensive for transportation applications.
Just my 2 cents……
Here is an extensive interview with Lockheed Martin on EEStor:
http://www.gm-volt.com/2008/01/10/lockheed-martin-signs-agreement-with-eestor/
[...] investment in large-scale battery technology this month. Earlier this month, ceramic battery maker EEStor signed an exclusive international rights agreement with aerospace giant Lockheed Martin for put EEStor’s electric energy storage units on the battlefield. Looks like the [...]
[...] its capacity up to 50 percent of a battery. Also in the hunt is Cedar Park, Texas-based EEStor (that we wrote about here), which does away with the electrolyte and instead uses an insulator called barium titanate, which [...]
Green energy is definitely the best solution in most cases. Technology like solar energy, wind power, fuel cells, zaps electric vehicles, EV hybrids, etc have come so far recently. Green energy even costs way less than oil and gas in many cases.
I think this agreement adds a lot of validity to the EEstor rumors. I don’t see how Lockheed Martin could possibly be interested in exclusive rights to EEstor unless they had something very exciting on the way.
EaJ
http://www.eestorbatteries.com
[...] this year EEStor got a huge credibility boost when it signed an exclusive agreement with defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which plans to use EEStor’s EESU for military and homeland security applications. Lockheed [...]
[...] signed an international rights agreement with military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin to integrate its EESUs into military applications. Meanwhile, Electric car maker ZENN Motor Cars [...]
[...] signed an international rights agreement with military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin to integrate its EESUs into military applications. Meanwhile, Electric car maker ZENN Motor Cars [...]
[...] signed an international rights agreement with military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin to integrate its EESUs into military applications. Meanwhile, Electric car maker ZENN Motor Cars [...]
[...] signed an international rights agreement with military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin to integrate its EESUs into military applications. Meanwhile, Electric car maker ZENN Motor Cars [...]
[...] energy storage for the military could be big business for little startups. Lockheed has partnered with EEStor to deploy its ultracapacitor-derived device on the battlefield, while Altairnano has signed a $2.5 [...]
[...] energy storage for the military could be big business for little startups. Lockheed has partnered with EEStor to deploy its ultracapacitor-derived device on the battlefield, while Altairnano has signed a $2.5 [...]
[...] energy storage for the military could be big business for little startups. Lockheed has partnered with EEStor to deploy its ultracapacitor-derived device on the battlefield, while Altairnano has signed a $2.5 [...]
[...] Park, Texas-based startup said in 2007 that it would be in production by mid 2008. Then that got bumped back to late 2008. Most recently, EEStor CEO Richard Weir told the Technology Review that production would start [...]
[...] deliver on the hype surrounding them. Even the more recent endorsements from third party auditors, a deal with Lockheed Martin and their ongoing partnership with ZENN motors does not make me think they can produce an award [...]
[...] EEStor watchers know, the startup announced a contract back in January 2008 to integrate energy storage units into military applications. Craig Vanbebber of Lockheed Martin [...]
[...] a little more than a year after the company said it plans to test stealthy startup EEStor’s supercapacitors on the battlefield as part of its effort to achieve “energy independence for the Warfighter.” The defense [...]
[...] weight and volume, at half the cost of lead-acid batteries. If EEStor delivers, it would, in short, turn mobile energy on its head. But Cedar and Kang’s breakthrough, already licensed to two companies and much less of a [...]