“To most Americans, the word ‘Coors’ means beer,”
CoorsTek’s manufacturing roots go back to the early 20th century, when Adolph Coors diversified his beer brewing empire based in Golden, Colo. He set up a ceramic manufacturing business called the Herold China and Pottery Company, whose early product line included dinnerware and utensils but later moved to high-tech industrial products made of ceramics. With World Wars I and II, the company stepped up to provide needed ceramics for industry and the military, including materials used in the production of the atom bomb.
“To most Americans, the word ‘Coors’ means beer,” wrote Business Wire on the ceramic maker’s 75th birthday. “But to scientists and industrialists throughout the world, the word ‘Coors’ means technical ceramics of extraordinary quality.”
That hasn’t changed. Cellular telephones, car engines, computer chips, soda dispensers, semiconductor casings, blood processing pumps, bulletproof vests and armor for military vehicles, to name just a few items in a dizzying high-tech product array, all use ceramic components produced by Coors enterprises. And so it was natural in 2008 for CoorsTek to purchase the hottest ceramics R&D firm going — Ceramatec, with its 165 employees in Salt Lake City.
Ceramatec was founded in 1976 by a group of University of Utah professors who made important contributions to the sodium-sulphur battery technology being pursued by Ford Motor Company for vehicles at the time. Those early liquid-core batteries didn’t pan out well for transportation, though, because of their size and weight, and because of the extremely harsh internal chemical conditions required for them to work.
In the years since, electric cars have remained on the sexy-tech list, with substantial industry efforts aimed at developing various flavors of zippy batteries to power them. Ceramatec had other ideas, recognizing a vast potential market for a different sort of power — for homes.
“With a house, you don’t need to get energy in and out instantaneously. You need huge amounts of storage capacity,” says MIT’s Nocera. “That suggests a different commercial market and different technical restraints and opportunities.”
Different for sure, but what a boon for for us, who take renewable energy systems seriously! We can install out own home solar system along with this new battery and we should be able to outlast any potential disaster! Why wait for the government to act, that could take years to design and implement anything worthy, and when they do, it wioll nt be all that cheap. build your own solar panels, you can do it in a weekend, and stop being dependant on your local utility.
Monday, find out what coor’s is doing next!