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The Calgary Herald reports that EEStor is "expected to release the results of independent third-party testing" of it's capacitor based battery system "sometime over the next several weeks." According to the article, EEStor says the system will be "commercially ready within six months."

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• Battery technology breakthrough?

• CityZENN: Hope or hype?

Wired has a cool story about an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who is working on a prototype plug-in hybrid that can go 50 miles on a charge, gets 100MPG, and has a solar panel on the roof that will power the car for five miles.

The car is a converted Toyota Prius, with advanced lithium-ion batteries. It's charged using an external solar array. One of their areas of research is li-ion battery efficiency and thermal management.

There's been a lot of buzz about the CityZENN all electric car that charges in five minutes and has a top speed of 80MPH and a range of 250 miles.

The secret is the EEStor capacitor battery, but some are skeptical. On the other hand, EEStor has recently signed a deal with Lockheed for defense related applications. So maybe it's real after all.

More at Alternative Energy News.

Nissan has announced it will invest $115 million in a joint venture with NEC to mass produce lithium-ion batteries, a key component for the next generation of plug-in hybrid and plug-in electric cars. Production is set to begin in 2009, with an initial capacity of 13,000 batteries per year and eventually 65,000 per year.

Lithium-ion batteries have higher energy density which allows for smaller, lighter, higher-capacity batteries.

Toyota was planning to introduce lithium-ion batteries in the next generation Prius, but safety concerns have delayed that for one or two more model years according to industry analysts.

GM is said to have a lithium-ion battery ready for their Volt plug-in electric car. Whoever gets there first will get a jump on the next generation of hybrids and plug-ins.

A secretive Austin Texas company claims to have invented a solid state battery that will make current electro-chemical batteries and the internal combustion engine obsolete. Skeptics say it is beyond any known technology and compared it to "alchemy."

According to news reports, batteries based on EEStor's ultracapacitor technology would enable you to plug in your electric car for five minutes and drive 500 miles on the charge. It could also be used to store power from solar panels and for "flash" charging of devices such as laptops and cellphones.

A small electric car company, ZENN Motors, has licensed the technology and expects to use it in a short-range, low-speed vehicle later this year.

On the web:

• EEStor Wikipedia

• EEStor Patent 7,033,406

• ZENN Motor Company