Don’t get me wrong — I’m glad GE is making this investment. It’s just that it was a decision being contemplated three years ago by a group of Canadian companies that simply couldn’t round up the funding to make it work. Perhaps they were just a bit ahead of their time.

Here’s what I wrote in July 2006 about a small Ontario-based utility called Halton Hills Hydro and Mississauga-based battery company BET Services, which had set up a 100-kilowatt-hour pilot project to demonstrate the battery’s potential:

Halton Hills Hydro and its partners — including battery expert BET Services Inc. of Mississauga – have a grander vision of proving that the Swiss-made Zebra batteries can be used economically for a number of applications if volume production can be achieved… What Halton Hills Hydro and its partners want to do is negotiate a licensing agreement so that a manufacturing facility can be set up in southern Ontario to supply the North American market. The load-shifting demonstration project is the first part of a plan to demonstrate that the batteries work and to attract private investment in such a venture. Assuming about $100 million (U.S.) could be raised, the group estimates they could set up a manufacturing operation that would produce 100,000 Zebra units by 2015, making them economical for utility, industrial and even residential storage applications and some transportation uses.

Funny how the $100 million (U.S.) being sought back then is exactly what GE is investing today. I’m not sure whether GE has any dealings with MES-DEA, but as the Swiss company has shown the sodium-nickel-chloride chemistry works quite well. The technology has been around since the 1970s, but MES-DEA never produced more than a couple thousand units a year so they were always costly because of a lack of volume.

BET Services had built an electric bus years ago based on four Zebra batteries. It built the bus from the ground up and had the vision of selling a “bus-in-a-box” that, like Ikea products, could be shipped and easily assembled anywhere in the world. It had a few demonstrations — I had a chance to ride one of them, which was cool — but I haven’t heard much of it since. I know at one point Railpower, the now defunct maker of hybrid locomotives, had considered the Zebra battery but opted instead for lead-acid batteries. Now, of course, we see GE embracing the sodium-nickel-chloride chemistry for transportation solutions, including trains, trucks, buses and tugboats. Go figure!