Ultracapacitor Technology for the Here and Now!

Whether it’s potential customers, partners or investors, whenever I speak to people outside the company the fact that impresses them most about Maxwell is that the technology is in use all over the world today.

We have literally millions of ultracapacitors out in the field working everyday, in windmills for pitch control, in trains and buses for regenerative braking, in enterprise storage, and much more.  This isn’t a technology that we’re hoping to have a prototype completed in five years.  We’ve had our ultracapacitors working in the field since 2002.

The downside of our technological advancements, if there is one, is that the electrical engineers of today were not trained to think of ultracapacitors in this way.  In fact, I have a college electrical engineering textbook from a few years back that talks of ultracapacitors in pico and nano farads.  We can package 3,000 farads in an ultracap the size of a Coca-Cola can.

So the technologists out there applying the technology haven’t caught up yet—but we’re making headway.  We don’t have an educated customer yet.  When you talk to electrical engineers, they don’t comprehend what we can do because they weren’t taught it. 

There’s lots of companies with new technologies that say give us another two years.  We’re past that point.  Our ultracapacitors are tried and true and now we’re being designed into automobiles.