WIMA has announced a new breed of super capacitors. Let me tell you why this is cool.

I am interested in large capacitors because I like to repair and refurbish old vacuum tube amplifiers and one component that goes bad is the large capacitors. These act a little like batteries in that they store electricity for a short time until the circuit needs it. They dry out and get old and have to be replaced.

Recently, I have thought about capacitors and hybrid vehicles. I have been doing the math and a conventional battery can be replaced by an array of capacitors. The caps are cheaper than a battery and they don’t wear out as fast. They are lighter. The limitation is that they don’t quite have the storage of a chemical battery.

So today I read a press release from WIMA about their new capacitor. The principle that they use was actually discovered in 1856 by Helmholtz, but is just now starting to build up steam. The higher the voltage, the more you can store in a capacitor. The storage goes up with the square of the voltage so if you make a cap that can take 10 volts instead of 1 volt it has 100 times as much power storage. High voltage capacitors are difficult to handle and hard to make. WIMA gets around this by putting a 100 million low voltage caps in a small box. A capacitor that weighs 90 grams or about 3 ounces can store about 900 joules (a joule, as my physics professor once said, is the energy used by a mosquito to do a push-up). 900 joules is not much, but the things are tiny and you can put quite a lot them in a car in the unused spaces in doors and ceilings and behind seats, or even where the engine used to be.

50 pounds of WIMA SuperCaps can store 1.1 million joules. This is a good chunk of power and is the same as 30 kilowatt-hours. The average daily usage of electricity for a house is about 30 Kilowatt-hours per day, so 50 pounds of WIMA caps can power a house for a day. In a car you use .37 kilowatt-hours worth of gas to go a mile. If you could charge up 50 pounds of WIMA capacitor array you could go 81 miles at 1/3 the cost of gas. If you use braking action to recapture energy, you can make this well over 100 miles. If you want to go hybrid, you can put in a small, efficient gas engine to charge the caps while you are away from a wall outlet.

If you pack in 400 pounds of SuperCaps into the space where the engine used to be, you get over 600 miles to a charge.

I am guessing that the cost of the capacitors is a little prohibitive right now. I can’t find pricing on these SuperCaps (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it). I predict, though, that they will be selling for 1/10 the price in a few years as they production costs go down and competition kicks in. In 10 years these caps will be very cost effective.

Why aren’t the automobile companies all over this? Beats the hell out of me. Are the gas companies paying them off to stick to conventional engines? Why are the Japanese 10 years ahead of us on building hybrid cars? These capacitors are going to get cheaper and smaller very fast. If you are looking to put a few thousand into a long shot, I would invest it in companies like WIMA. Either that, or sell short on GM.