As Maxwell’s involvement with China has grown, both to source low-cost commodities and assembly labor for our ultracapacitor products and as an increasingly significant consumer of our products, I have become a regular visitor to this amazing country and a fascinated observer of its dynamic economy.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a Western journalist’s account of his visit to the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. He describes it as “the world’s largest-ever event . . . with the exception of wars . . . 20 times the size of the last world expo.” (link to article). The Chinese government reportedly spent the equivalent of some $60 billion to stage the Expo as a showcase not only for its arrival as a world power, but also to exhibit and demonstrate its commitment to sustainable technologies.

To ferry a half million people a day around the vast Expo site, the government ordered hundreds of zero emission electric buses from its state-owned Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), which has become one of the world’s 10 largest automakers. The journalist wrote:

“SAIC used the opportunity to trial all the logical new technologies, such as supercapacitor buses – more than 300 of them. If you haven’t heard of a supercapacitor, it’s a device that can rapidly accumulate an electric charge, such as from regenerative braking, but its biggest advantage is that it can also quickly release that charge, and provide the peak power levels which existing batteries cannot deliver. This rapid recharge and discharge makes it ideal for a bus, which needs heavy initial power to get underway, and has short and frequent cycles. Supercapacitors are expensive but, like everything else, they’ll get cheaper with mass production, and have a life of millions of charge-discharge cycles so they will definitely play a role in the future of high performance electric vehicles. Running such a massive fleet of clean energy vehicles and solving real world problems on the fly will logically give SAIC a competitive edge.”

I will admit my personal bias, but there’s a man who knows what he’s talking about! As a matter of fact, Maxwell provided ultracapacitor modules assembled by our contract manufacturer in Shenzhen for one of those buses, and similar ultracapacitor-only designs are being tested and evaluated elsewhere in China. I recently had the opportunity to ride in one and was surprised by how smooth and quiet it was.

Expensive batteries and carbon-emitting internal combustion engines aren’t needed for these vehicles because the ultracapacitor system holds enough energy to propel a large transit bus up to three kilometers, and the average distance between urban bus stops is about 500 meters. Regenerative braking partially recharges the ultracapacitor pack each time the bus brakes, and a contact or inductive charging system at each stop tops off the pack for the next leg of the route.

Other transit operators in China and elsewhere around the world are combining ultracapacitors with batteries or internal combustion engines to provide additional range for routes where the distance between stops is greater. In these hybrid configurations, ultracapacitors’ efficiency in absorbing virtually all of the available regenerative braking energy during the few seconds that it takes to stop a vehicle and their ability to discharge just as quickly to assist acceleration relieves stress that shortens battery life, or saves fuel and reduces emissions associated with internal combustion engines.

So, either as stand-alone energy storage and propulsion system or as a complement to batteries, fuel cells or internal combustion engines, ultracapacitors are establishing themselves as a key enabling technology for greener public transportation in China and beyond.

Putting smart people together to tackle a problem like we have with the grid today doesn’t necessarily mean we will end up with a smart grid.  We’ve all heard that “you have to walk before you can run” and “the only way to eat an elephant is a bite at a time.” Both statements are true and particularly relevant in tackling a massive project such as the grid.

In its annual 2010 Energy Outlook Report, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that the federal government has allocated $4.5 billion from ARRA funds to grid technology and infrastructure development. This investment is intended to assist the advancement of the grid for every man, woman and child in the country who uses the energy supplied by it every single day.

This is a good start but this amount of money will only push the effort a bit of the way it needs to go. The Green Tech Newsletter estimates that by 2015, more than $45 billion will be spent on “smartening” and expanding the US grid.

As politicians and bureaucrats decide how to separate you from your hard-earned dollars by creating grandiose and broad-reaching grid projects that taxpayers will be hard-pressed to pay for, they appear to be missing the “low-hanging fruit” that promises to have a large impact in a timeframe that you and I can  relate to. We are facing a crisis that cries out for solutions now. We cannot wait decades for the benefit of the investments we are being asked to make today.

Most current and proposed grid programs focus on the energy storage requirements of the grid aimed at so-called middle time frames — minutes to hours of storage. That’s a perfect place for none other than…..you guessed it, batteries.  There are numerous programs and demonstrations both funded and unfunded aiming at middle time frame energy storage requirements. These are the time frames required for storage of energy generated by renewable energy resources, primarily wind and solar.

The story for short-term energy storage is different. I am aware of only one demonstration program for short-term frequency regulation of power. The technology involved is a flywheel supplied by Beacon Power and funded by NYSERDA. The DOE, through its ARPA-E organization, has just provided additional funding to Beacon to advance the design of that flywheel to reduce cost and improve performance.

From where I sit, it appears that the smart people are being short-sighted in virtually overlooking short-term energy storage opportunities for the grid. The following excerpt from a recent article in AZoM, a science and engineering newsletter on the advancement of materials and technologies of materials, describes potential grid applications for ultracapacitors:  

The near-term opportunities for load-leveling storage are clear. Approximately 90 percent of power outages last for no longer than two seconds, and 98 percent of outages last, at most, 30 seconds, but their economic effects are large. Estimates range from $75 to $200 billion per year impact from power interruptions due to lost time, lost commerce, and damage to equipment.

This is right in the ultracapacitor’s wheelhouse. With that kind of annual cost and infrastructure impact, more focus and attention should be paid to demonstrating the benefits of tried-and-true existing technology for short-term grid storage requirements. A single project centered around a single technology is not going to provide an optimum solution.  Today’s ultracapacitor technologies present themselves as a ready solution to tackle up to 98 percent of all grid outages with ease and the longest lifetime available. That is a significant capability that can virtually instantly take on and address the impacts of short-term outages.

Smart people don’t always make smart decisions about where to put time, money and resources. Often, the simplest and most obvious solution is the one that makes the most sense. It is time to press on the topic of short-term energy storage on the grid for the far more immediate benefit it can provide.

Consumer demand for greener, more fuel-efficient vehicles continues to drive automotive research and development to reduce weight and fuel consumption, manage internal power loads and capture and reuse energy that is wasted in conventional braking systems.  While early efforts have proved valuable, they are just the beginning of more energy-efficient and environmentally-compatible automotive design.  Regardless of engine size, a car’s performance is important and automakers are giving us some intriguing glimpses of the future direction in more efficient power sources.

Automotive OEMs are developing cars with smaller engines that provide adequate power in bigger platforms and boost performance with electrical energy by using Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), some utilizing ultracapacitors to capture and store regenerative braking energy.  With the ability to recapture and reuse braking energy, ultracapacitors can supplement the internal combustion engine during acceleration, reducing fuel consumption by up to 50 percent and particulate emissions by 90 percent when compared with conventional diesel engines.

In the automotive industry, as well as others, ultracapacitors are considered an environmentally-friendly solution because, unlike batteries, they can perform reliably through a million or more charge-discharge cycles without having to be disposed of and replaced.  With their low internal resistance (ESR), ultracapacitors have high power density to meet instantaneous power needs, such as acceleration. Because their energy storage mechanism does not involve a chemical reaction, they perform normally over a very wide temperature range, giving them a significant all-weather advantage over batteries.

Volatile oil prices and steadily increasing energy demand are creating greater urgency in the world’s search for greener, more sustainable energy sources.  It is interesting to see the auto industry’s bold introduction of cleaner, greener hybrid and electric cars, even though they currently cost more and sacrifice some performance vs. their internal combustion counterparts.  Despite the relatively unattractive return on investment for today’s hybrid and electric car owners, an increasing number of early adopters are willing to pay the hybrid premium to be green. That is likely to spur other automotive manufacturers to develop eco-friendly, energy-efficient models.

Maxwell Technologies develops, manufacturers and markets ultracapacitor-based energy storage and power delivery solutions that enhance the performance, efficiency and reliability of hybrid and electric vehicles.  Efficient, cost-effective, energy storage is a key enabling technology, for the electrification of transportation, and we believe that ultracapacitors will play and important and increasing role in that transformation.

With oil continuing to wash ashore in the Gulf of Mexico, 11 senators and 35 representatives are demanding a ban or moratorium on offshore oil drilling.  Hearings are underway to investigate the Massey Mine disaster, which killed 29 miners and reminded America of the risks and cost of coal extraction.  The Department of the Interior’s approval of Cape Wind’s application to harness wind off the coast of Massachusetts has detractors pledging to tie the process up for years in the courts.

Without a doubt, we will need new sources of supply.  But with promising new supplies requiring significant time and capital to design, build and install at any meaningful scale, the search for more energy needs to begin with a search for more efficiency.

Yet last year alone the venture capital industry invested more than $2.6 billion in supply-side technologies.  While these investments may pay dividends in the long run, they dwarf the $400 million of the VC investment in energy efficiency that can yield dividends today.

According to the Energy Information Administration, America’s demand for energy compared to our GDP makes us the 137^th most energy-efficient country in the world.  The good news is that it’s not hard to find energy waste, and many of the tools and technologies we need to become more efficient already exist, which gets me to my point.

Ultracapacitors is an existing technology that is a cleaner, cheaper way to meet our needs for energy efficiency.  The cost of a company investing in energy efficiency such as ultracapacitors is more efficient and is on average five times less than an investment in a new energy supply.  There are huge new market applications just waiting to be discovered. 

Ultracapacitors are an enabling technology for reliable, energy-efficient, cost-effective and environmentally-compatible solutions for automotive, heavy transportation, renewable energy and industrial OEMs seeking to respond to those market drivers.  For example, we are collaborating with Continental AG, one of the world’s leading automotive electronics and mechatronics suppliers, who is using the Maxwell ultracapacitor as the energy storage element of a voltage stabilization system (VSS) for automobiles.  Stop-start systems reduce fuel consumption and emissions by shutting off the car’s internal combustion engine as the vehicle slows and seamlessly restarts the engine when the driver engages the clutch or touches the accelerator.  Continental AG is marketing the voltage stabilization system it has developed to its automotive OEM customers.

As I mentioned earlier, recent events have made it clear just how hard it will be to build any new energy infrastructure – clean or dirty.  Yes, we will need new sources of energy.  But until then, it is easier and better for the environment to use enabling technologies such as ultracapacitors where we can do more with less.  That’s the energy solution companies should be investing in today.

 Recently we had the good fortune of being included in two news stories I’d like to share with you.

The first was by Heather Clancy from ZDNet’s GreenTech Pastures about ultracapacitors and their different uses in energy storage. I spoke with Heather last month while on a trip to New York.  Here’s part of what she had to say: 

Being that my physics background is limited to a high-school honors class and to a “Physics for Arts Students” I took during my undergraduate days at McGill University, I agreed to an education briefing by Maxwell Technologies CEO David Schramm.

The second was an in-depth article by Jim Motavalli on BNET about a new European hybrid vehicle being released later this year. This car uses Maxwell’s K2 2000 ultracapacitors in a start-stop system.

Ultracaps are ideally suited for use with a mild-hybrid drivetrain that shuts down at stoplights. Ultracaps, instead of a large battery pack, restart the engine, and are also on hand to provide power for acceleration. They can be quickly recharged with the power grabbed through regenerative braking. 

These articles are both great examples of the potential of ultracapacitors and showcase the exciting future in store for Maxwell.

Recently the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency announced new emissions and fuel efficiency standards for American car manufacturers. Since the announcement, there has been a great deal of discussion about how to meet these standards. Automotive companies are going to have to focus their efforts on finding an economical way to meet the new guidelines.

While lithium ion batteries have received a lot of press as being the answer for electric vehicles, there is still quite a bit of debate about when they will be a viable solution. In Mike Everett’s post back in January, he pointed out that some in the industry feel lithium ion is still a decade away from being attractive to consumers.

Recently, Don Hillebrand, director of the Argonne National Laboratory, echoed that sentiment when he told the Society of Automotive Engineers 2010 World Congress that lithium ion is still not ready for mainstream. In his keynote, Hillebrand stated that for a consumer to make a profit after paying $12,000 for an electric vehicle battery pack, they would have to drive their car 1,300 miles per day!

So how do car companies meet these standards—that begin in two years—when the technology they are researching is possibly 10 years away from being ready?

One solution that has already been adopted by European car manufacturers, where the fuel efficiency standards are even more aggressive, is the use of ultracapacitors in a start-stop system to dramatically reduce emissions from idling and to further improve fuel economy. Ultracapacitors can be recharged through regenerative braking and provide the power needed for acceleration and starting the vehicle—making the battery last longer. By decreasing the size of the battery, and at the same time increasing its life, ultracapacitors reduce system cost for all types of hybrid vehicles.

I am excited and hopeful these new standards will no longer make me wonder why American car makers haven’t embraced ultracapacitors.

I recently spent some time in Santa Barbara attending the Wall Street Journal ECO:nomics Conference. It was a great event with many informative sessions and discussions. While there I was lucky enough to meet T. Boone Pickens and also got to have a good brief chat with Energy Secretary Steven Chu about ultracapacitors and thanked him for using our products in his presentation at the Washington Auto Show. 

One interesting working group session I attended was “Green Marketing” facilitated by Alan Murray, the deputy managing editor and executive editor, online, for The Wall Street Journal. It was interesting to hear that while everybody believes in the idea of “going green,” at the same time, most consumers are not ready to pay extra to do it. There’s a small group of people who buy electric/hybrid cars because it is a green thing to do, or it’s the right thing to do, but for the most part, if the cost of your products are too high, it won’t matter how green your company is, you won’t get customers. 

So what does this mean? It means that the company that can make an innovative solution to both go green and lower consumer costs will be the big winner because going green and saving money is a one-two combo that is irresistible to the market. 

A customer may really want to purchase an electric car for environmental reasons but can’t  afford the price. But if the finances are the same, and performance is comparable to today’s gas-fueled cars, then why not? If you can show a customer you’re green and that your price is competitive, the customer will latch onto the green part. Then they can tell everybody “I’m green” and it didn’t cost them anything extra. 

This is what Maxwell ultracapacitors enable manufacturers to do. Our products make batteries more effective and reduce system cost for all types of hybrid vehicles. And it is not just us saying this, Argonne National Laboratory stated in their latest TransForum newsletter that if you put ultracapacitors together with lithium-ion batteries that you could “transform an $8,000 battery into a $4,000 all-electric drivetrain system.” That would be a big step forward in making a solution that is not only green, but also cost-effective for consumers.

Ultracapacitors are here to stay. Though unrecognized for their commercial viability for most of their technological lifetime, they are now being embraced by the commercial applications that they are so well-suited for.  And there’s much more to come. 

Last month, I was honored to represent Maxwell Technologies at a workshop in Washington D.C. on “Science for Energy Technologies” sponsored by the Basic Energy Sciences Program.  Part of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, the program is aimed at fundamental research into the topic of energy technologies and energy use. The Advisory Committee of the BES is a visionary board that sponsors workshops and publishes technical papers on the outputs from these workshops and other activities. They are worth reading as they reveal deep scientific foundations for the future of scientific research on specific topics. 

With industry need at the forefront, the 100 or so participants, which included such companies as A123 spent a 48-hour blitz on the future of energy technologies. With subtopics ranging from solar energy through energy storage to carbon sequestration, small breakout groups of experts spent some quality time together conjuring up and defining the scientific need for advancing energy technology in each of nine topical areas. 

I participated in the session on energy storage.  It was an enlightening, productive and important couple of days on the future of energy storage. Identifying scientific need for energy storage is critical to our national priorities. While this workshop was a deep snapshot into the challenges at this time, there is much more to come and the committee and participants acknowledged this as an ongoing requirement for the future.   

The output from the session will be a volume of summary chapters in a publication directed at detailing the immediate scientific imperatives to carry the technology of energy storage over the next five years. In April the co-chairs of the committee will brief the Office of Science on the report and publishing will follow sometime in the future from there. The contributors are distinguished experts in their fields and the contributions captured in this report will be meaningful and useful in setting scientific direction in the near term and for the mid-term implementation of energy technology to the benefit of the United States and the world.  

This will be a publication worth reading and I encourage you to seek it out when it is published. I’ll make sure I link to it from my blog as well. 

Maxwell is honored to have been invited to participate in this forum. But it was not Maxwell that the Office of Science and Basic Energy Sciences was after. It was an informed perspective on energy storage that was summoned. Ultracapacitor technology is now considered by both scientific and commercial circles as critical to the future of energy technologies around the globe.

I remember growing up and struggling through all the trials and tribulations of fixing a flat tire on a bicycle. It always seemed that when you had to get the wheel off to repair your tire tube all you had was a pair of poor-quality slip joint pliers from the bargain bin at the local hardware store. No sooner had you tried to remove the rusty nut from the spindle that the corners on the nut would round and the job would become a lot harder—if not impossible. And if you were lucky enough to get the nut off and remove the wheel, then the screwdriver that you were using to get the tire off the rim would further damage the very tube you were trying to repair. So the lesson I finally learned after my father said it over and over was: use the right tool for the right job.

So it is with energy storage.

Do battery makers compete with ultracapacitor makers for business? Do the two technologies fight over applications? The answer is that just like a screwdriver competes with a tire removal tool, they do. But as with tools, one specially designed for the purpose will always do a better job than one designed for another purpose and adapted to meet the existing need. And the definition of a “better job” is an optimization question when it comes to energy storage system design.

That is what is happening with ultracapacitors and batteries today. Batteries are being designed in where only ultracapacitors are needed. In contrast, ultracapacitors are being used where batteries just won’t do. Fortunately, there are some very progressive thinkers out there who recognize that energy delivery systems usually have more than one job to do and using the combination of the two is the best choice for the job. Delivery of energy and the delivery of power can be viewed as two different jobs, not just one. In this case, it is easy to take advantage of each technology for its strength.

I would point you to the 2009 published work detailing a collaborative effort between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and General Motors in which a Saturn Vue Greenline “mild hybrid” vehicle was outfitted with batteries and then compared to the performance of the vehicle with ultracapacitors in place of batteries. The investigators were looking to find out what effect the capacitors had on overall performance and economy of the vehicle and to compare it with the battery-powered equivalent.

The conclusions are interesting to say the least. At the highest level, in this particular mild hybrid characterization, there is no degradation in performance using ultracapacitors in place of batteries. In fact, there is a positive benefit using ultracapacitors instead of batteries where it can be done. Considering the other capabilities of the capacitors that batteries lack such as very low temperature operations and long lifetime, this seems a case where the right tool for the right job in that vehicle was not regarded when the vehicle was designed.

I have to say my fathers’ voice echoes in my head every time I pick up the wrong tool knowing that in the garage the right one is but a few steps away. The short walk there has resulted in a lot of time saved and quality work performed instead of the alternative. Therefore, take the short mental “walk” before selecting the wrong energy storage device just because it is lying next to you.

This post is in response to a comment on David’s Blog post  “The Chevy Volt Needs an Ultracapacitor”

COMMENT: Wistful? I’m curious why you, the CEO, are failing at getting these car companies to adopt your product? If it’s so much better than batteries then why aren’t they flocking to your company? I know they all know about your product. Heck, I’ve known about your product for over 10 years. But there has to be some reason over why it isn’t being used.

Off the top of my head some possibilities are:- a) expense, the manufacturers are looking at $$’s per kilowatt-hour of stored energy.. b) are control circuits complicated.. c) reliability.. d) kilowatt-hours per liter of volume.. All of those are important considerations a vehicle maker has before adopting a product, right?

–David Herron

Hello David,

First, just for background, I spent more than 25 years of my career with divisions of General Motors, most of them with Packard Electric, designing and manufacturing automotive wiring and electronics, so I have some insight into the very deliberate decision-making processes that have put the “Detroit 3” where they are today.  Maxwell ultracapacitors have been adopted by European car companies and we have been involved with the European design cycle for several years. So, car companies have adopted the technology, just not the ones in Detroit…. yet.

Second, we don’t claim that ultracapacitors are “better” than batteries. Batteries and ultracapacitors are complementary.  A battery, with its high-energy density, is like a marathon runner; the ultracap, whose forte is power density (rapid charge and discharge), is like a sprinter.

For decades every car on the road has had a lead-acid battery, so battery technology is well understood, and mass production has allowed battery makers to deliver them at a very low cost.  However, lead acid batteries aren’t capable of absorbing much regenerative braking energy and can’t tolerate deep charge/discharge cycling, so they aren’t practical for hybrid or electric cars. That’s why the industry has turned to much more expensive advanced battery chemistries such as nickel metal hydride for current hybrids and lithium-ion for EVs and HEVs now in development.   For those batteries to meet the cycling and power requirement of such vehicles they have to be oversized, driving their cost higher yet. A “hybrid” energy system employing ultracapacitors to handle power requirements such as braking energy recuperation and acceleration and using batteries to meet energy requirements would be less expensive and last longer. And the technology to do that is real and readily available today.

Toyota already has incorporated ultracapacitors into the braking system of its hybrid Prius. Continental AG is incorporating them into a fuel-saving “stop-start” automotive system a major European automaker will begin producing this year. Here in the U.S., side-by-side testing by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), co-sponsored by GM, demonstrated that an ultracapacitor pack weighing significantly less than comparable batteries can meet the energy storage requirements of a mild hybrid auto.  Additional studies have shown that an ultracapacitor pack would offer the added benefits of better cold weather performance and longer operational lifetime. Just last week at the Washington Auto show, U.S. Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu stated that a combination of ultracaps and batteries can “improve the gas mileage in all vehicles” by more efficiently absorbing regenerative braking energy.

Ultracapacitors have proven their value, safety, efficiency and durability in more than 1,000 public transit buses now in daily revenue service in the U.S., Europe and Asia, so we aren’t suggesting that U.S. automakers take a “leap of faith.” Rather, we are suggesting that Detroit could reinvent itself and create U.S. jobs by taking advantage of cost-effective, readily available, American technology to produce the energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly cars consumers want.