Grounded in Reality, Maxwell Technology’s CEO Dispels Static Around Ultracapacitors

Is it just me, or have ultracapacitors somehow become the latest hot and mysterious alternative energy technology?

Just a few weeks ago, my Xconomy colleague Greg Huang reported that Seattle startup EnerG2 landed $8.5 million in venture funding to develop a new class of ultracapitors that use nanocomposite materials to store energy. Before that, Light Electric Vehicles of Eugene, OR, announced that EEStor, a secretive company in Cedar Park, TX, would supply ultracapacitors next year for LightEV’s two- and three-wheel vehicles. Then I noticed that one of three finalists in a $25,000 contest organized on YouTube to solicit ideas for a new “Energy X Prize” was a proposal to create a new storage medium—an “ultracapacitor.”

This fascination may be due to the fact that the technology is akin to catching lightning in a bottle—literally. An ultracapacitor is an electronic device used to store electrical energy. It can charge and discharge electricity almost instantaneously, albeit at low voltage, hundreds of thousands of times without being depleted.

Now it just so happens that a San Diego company called Maxwell Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MXWL]]) has been developing ultracapacitors for the past 15 years. So this flurry of recent announcements left me confused. Doesn’t the technology needed to make ultracapacitors already exist?

So I arranged to talk with David Schramm, the CEO at Maxwell, which has been manufacturing ultracapacitors for commercial customers for the past seven years or so. And I asked: What do these recent announcements mean? Is the big breakthrough in ultracapacitors yet to come?

“I have a hard time shadow-boxing against some of these things, I don’t know where to start,” Schramm says. “It’s one thing to write on a piece of paper what you’re going to do, and it’s another thing to work with people who have actually done it.”

Maxwell, which was founded as a government R&D contractor in 1965, inherited its expertise in ultracapacitors from working on power sources for pulsed lasers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Maxwell decided to focus on developing ultracapacitors for commercial markets in the early 1990s, as defense spending plunged in the years following the dismantling of the Soviet Union. But making money from ultracapacitors has been a challenge for Maxwell, and the company has been continually reinventing itself for the past 10 or 15 years.

One problem, Schramm says, is that the industrialized world

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.