Leaked CEO conversation suggests electricity revolution coming
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Independent Minds
Transcripts and audio files of a leaked phone conversation between the secretive CEO of Texas-based EEStor, Dick Weir, and an as yet undisclosed source have been doing the rounds online for the last 24 hours creating a stir amongst technologists and environmentalists around the world.
Whilst you'd be forgiven for thinking that a leaked phone conversation on the internet was merely yawn worthy, this particular conversation saw eeStore CEO, Weir confirming that they are mere months away from launching an uber capacitor which is an electrical component that would fully charge up in minutes yet hold enough juice to power electronic gadgets for days.
Should this leaked conversation be something more than a cleverly orchestrated PR stunt, and EEStor's invention actually work, the implications are nothing short of revolutionary.
Electric cars could finally become a viable option. Photovoltaic solar cells and wind turbines could store their own energy, reducing global dependence on less clean forms of energy and most importantly giving us notebook PCs and iPods that charge in seconds but run for days.
If this all sounds more than a little Buck Rogers, there has been some independent corroboration of eeStor's claims.
In May ZENN Motor Company (who hold exclusive rights to the eestor capacitor system for vehicles under 1,400kg) confirmed that their own independent testing verified that EEStor's capacitors were on track to performing as promised. This said, eeStor's claims have also attracted scepticism from capacitor experts and to date no uuber capacitor prototypes have been publicly tested.
The leaked conversation delves into the ins and outs of building capacitors in excruciating detail.
The leaked conversation even alludes to a involvement with military contractors Lockheed Martin. Weir also confirms that pre-production prototypes of what he calls an electrical energy storage unit (EESU) could be revealed as soon as the end of this year.
EEStor is not the first company to claim it's about to revolutionise energy generation or storage, with Steorn announcing in 2006 that they'd circumvented the law of conservation of energy with its "Orb" generator to produce clean, free and constant power.
After a botched demonstration in 2007 where Steorn blamed heat from the camera lights for the failure, Steorn has yet to deliver any free energy. Will EEStor come up with the goods? Only time will tell.
The article is sourced from the New Zealand Herald.
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Comments
By the way the term "uber' seem very journalistically popular at the moment, it translates into 'over' or 'above' the word you actually needed both grammatically and technically is 'Super' (without an umlaut in English of course).
danke,
ein ‘uber’ engineer.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/6648
Pat Pilcher
PITCHER You are the boss Whatever you say goes, Say go.Will EEStor come up with the goods? Only time will tell. So you tell we wait. Hokey dockey we wait, in the meantime let us have a cup of cow soup? Say what?
I am so happy it will come in the garve that si so dark I fear that Do you? NO? WHY? YES? WHY? Okay ?
View full article here. NO I trust you. I know you never steal from poor.
rigid, strict, and uncompromising
grim, austere, or forbidding in appearance
I thank you
Firozali A.Mulla
1) A Battery STORES ENERGY that has to be produced somewhere else, maybe in a nuclear reactor.
2) The usefulness of a battery is dependent on its maximum energy density, how much energy it can store per volume unit. With batteries reaching the numbers applicable to sticks of dynamite, not much is going to change in the near future. So "running for days"? In your dreams.
3) Even if you could charge a battery "faster", would that really be revolutionary? Not for your GSM battery. As for your car battery ... how much ampere is your main fuse able to carry?
"Steorn announcing in 2006 that they'd circumvented the law of conservation of energy"
Yeah, this really takes the biscuit. CERN would like to hear about that, it would simply the next collider design something fierce.
The whole point of battries is the ability to transport your mains power to a portable device. I think your thoughts are along the lines of a free energy device which generates its energy within a self-contained unit.
The capacitor idea is good, but power density is the problem. EEStor are making big claims, they sound impressive on paper. If its true then they are going to become a very rich company. The world is in need of instant charge power sources - to tackle green issues and for convenience.
But reading the other posts, it seems they haven't delivered technical paper or a demo model. So it looks like we shouldn't get too carried away with this (for now).
But, seeing only will bring believing.
http://www.ecogeek.org/power-storage/23
The other major player in this story is a Canadian firm called Zenn, a manufacturer of electric cars; this firm was an early sponsor of EEStor and secured certain rights for distribution for this technology in the production of drive systems for future electric cars and use in its own vehicles. Basically the claims from both companies state that this system will let a car charge in minutes instead of hours and give that vehicle a range of about 300 miles between charges.
Nether firm has done any public tests of a working system, but have recently completed something called a permittivity test, conducted by independent experts. This test was to prove the properties of the material to be used for this new technology. Based on the success of this test a lot of investment has been pumped into EEStor by some serous players in the industry including organisations like Lockheed Martin and major venture capitol investment group Kleiner Perkins and Topfer, this group now owns 20% of EEStor.
I think when you consider the potential enemies of this technology, meaning who gets hurt by its introduction, the secretive nature of this development becomes a little more clear, basically, big oil and traditional power distribution gets hurt in a big way, those are very powerful forces to have against you, both have proven history of blocking harmful competition.
A very important clue and piece of this puzzle to recently come to light is the fact that EEStor has ramped up its production facility in Texas since the announcement of the success of the permittivity tests. I think this shows that something important is indeed stirring with this story. EEStor is also talking about scaling down the technology for other applications outside the remit of car production, personally I can’t wait for a power source that is only 5 lbs and will take me on my bicycle for over 100 hundred miles between fast charges, plus this system is significantly cheaper to produce than current options, so should cost us the consumer less to purchase in the first place.
small scale lighting device.....
At present most wind ups are a wind up.
Here's a smattering of what it would mean:
1.
It would take advantage of the traditionally low off-peak utilization of electrical power generation, transmission, and distribution facilities to recharge electricity storage equipment during off peak hours. This would have the effect of (a) displacing FOREIGN oil with AMERICAN nuclear power, AMERICAN coal, AMERICAN hydropower, AMERICAN natural gas, AMERICAN wind power, AMERICAN solar power, AMERICAN co-generation, AMERICAN municipal incinerators, and AMERICAN biomass (the last currently primarily from the forest products industry), and (b) since the utility industry could sell many more megawatt hours without any additional investment in plants, lines, or substations required, the cost of electricity could reasonably be expected to decline - perhaps dramatically.
2.
It would dramatically reduce the amount of pollution coming from our transportation sector. This is because any type of electrical generation is considerably more efficient than the intgernal combustion engines used in todays gasoline powered automobiles.
3.
It would eliminate the necessity of building many power plants, substations, and transmission lines that otherwise would be required to complement wind and solar farms due to their intermittent nature. Transmission facilities from wind and solar farms equipped with storage facilities would only be required to carry their average power output rather than their maximum. This would help to hold down the cost of electricity as well as reduce the number transmission lines required to cross our countryside.
4.
It would replace gasoline engines with their many moving parts with electric motors, each of which has exactly one moving part.
I don't know enough to judge the accuracy of EEStor's claims. But I sure hope they turn out to be true. It would be the best thing to happen to the non-OPEC world in a long, long time.