I have spent the last couple of days at the EESAT 2005 Conference in San Francisco, hosted by the Electrical Storage Association with Sandia Labs and the DOE. The forum was focused mainly on large scale storages schemes. It was a long running well run forum, done every two years, 150+ attendance. Frankly, about the presentations themselves, I was disappointed. Very few of the discussions were down to earth where I could relate. I listened to a lot of discussion of the importance of electrical storage to the region, but the discussion was very academic, heavy on the study side, very light on either the technology or products coming to market. And the policy discussion lacked a sense of the reality of what economics were going to be.

A few of the flow battery folks were there: VRB Power and ZBB (an Australian company, I was surprised to learn), as well as other perennial battery developers, Electro Energy some of the flywheel companies: Vicon, Pentadyne, Active Power, Boeing, Beacon. and EPRI and the State of California was well represented, as well as lot of academics, consultants, and a few global firms scouting progress or talking up a pilot they were involved in. There were also a number of papers on concepts like compressed air storage, which have been around for years with no takers.

I felt I was watching the CHP discussion of 5 years ago all over again, except it was on storage. A lot of teams chasing a market that is unlikely to materialize in the way or of the size they are expecting. The bright spots included a realization that integration was the key, but there was very little sense of near term products or projects being brought to market.

The most interesting discussion I thought was by a Japanese firm I had not heard of called Power Systems Co. (Very little of their English language website is finished.) I am not sure why they were giving a paper at this particular conference, but the engineer who presented said they had built a $25 mm plant to manufacture a next generation of supercapacitors, that they termed NanoCaps, product name ECaSS, and were selling an earlier generation now in Japan. Frankly, they were the only credible presentation I saw on a near term commercial business.

Noticeably absent or in short supply across the board were investors, customers, buyers, or other people with non-R&D based budgets. So that’s either opportunity, or perhaps just symptomatic of the state of large scale electrical storage today.