Entrepreneurs Invest Their Energy In Innovations for Alternative Fuel
Published Apr 16, 2007
Although it’s about the size of a postage stamp, Infinite Power Solutions’ LiTE*STAR thin-film battery packs a lot of punch.
Imagine a battery the size of a postage stamp that automatically and perpetually recharges itself by harvesting ambient energy such as sunlight. Imagine a battery-powered school bus that costs $750 per year to operate rather than burning $10,000 worth of diesel fuel annually. Imagine no longer, because innovative Jefferson County companies are working to make those energy-saving and cost-efficient products realities.
“We expect great things in manufacturing here in the United States, where we’re building the first-ever, solid-state, thin-film battery manufacturing facility in the world,” says Raymond Johnson, president and chief executive officer of Infinite Power Solutions Inc. in Golden. In 2006, the company raised $35.7 million from private investors to build a high-volume manufacturing facility for production of its LiTE*STAR thin-film batteries. “We hope to start shipping batteries by the end of 2007 or the first quarter of 2008,” he says.
The tiny LiTE*STAR is “an energy storage device” that can reliably power microelectronic systems, Johnson says. Potential applications include smart cards, radio-frequency identification tags, and “smart munitions that need a battery source that is thin and can survive temperature and launch conditions, which our battery can,” Johnson says.
Because the battery is solid state, it could power a sensor implanted into the body to read and wirelessly transmit to a doctor a patient’s blood glucose level or drug delivery data. The next-generation of the battery will feature greater capacity and can be integrated into a printed circuit board, he adds.
Johnson says it’s “huge” that Infinite Power is building the first factory of its kind because “the company that can first get to volume manufacturing will win the market share.”
BUSES OF DISTINCTION
That’s the same logic shared by Dale Hill, chief executive officer of Mobile Energy Solutions LLC, which in April 2007 moved into its new plant in the Golden-based Coors Technology Center. Hill expects that by 2009, Mobile Energy will employ about 100 people to produce energy-saving buses.
Hill has quite a track record: A company he founded in 1997 built Denver’s 16th Street Mall shuttles – hybrid-electric buses with four-cylinder Ford engines that run on compressed natural gas. “It’s the most successful and still the largest hybrid-electric bus fleet anywhere in the world,” he says. In seven years of operation, the fleet has served 130 million passengers.
In 2004, Hill founded Mobile Energy at the behest of the Federal Transit Administration to develop a bus powered by a fuel cell and batteries. That prototype, constructed with lightweight fiberglass and a foam core, should hit the road by the end of 2007.
During impact testing, buses built of composite materials fared much better than conventional buses, he adds.
That’s one reason Hill is energized about the company’s initial work on school bus designs. “Whereas a regular bus was demolished, the car just bounced off the composite bus. The paint was scratched,” he says, “so it’s much safer.” Another reason: While approximately 5,000 large transit buses are bought in the United States annually, the number of school buses purchased is around 32,000.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Infinite Power Solutions Inc.
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