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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

A New Deal for EEStor

A delayed battery technology may indeed be on the way.

By Tyler Hamilton
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Good-bye batteries?: The startup EEStor says that it has technology that will store ten times as much energy as lead acid batteries.
Credit: Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority

Earlier this month, a stealthy startup that says its ultracapacitor-based energy storage system could make conventional batteries obsolete took a small step toward proving its many skeptics wrong.

The company, EEStor, based in Cedar Park, TX, has made bold claims about its technology but has so far failed to deliver a working commercial product. However, an agreement announced this month with Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, MD, suggests that the company could be making progress--at least enough to convince a major defense contractor that the technology has merit. The agreement gives Lockheed an exclusive international license to use EEStor's power system for military and homeland-security applications--everything from advanced remote sensors and missile systems to mobile power packs and electric vehicles. The technology, Lockheed said in a statement, "could lead to energy independence for the Warfighter."

Lockheed has not seen a working prototype but said that qualification testing and mass production of EEStor's system is planned for late 2008. Lockheed would not disclose the terms of the partnership. "We fully intend to work with EEStor this year to prototype and demonstrate this technology for the soldier," says Lionel Liebman, Lockheed's manager of program development in its applied research division. "We're looking at a lot of applications where the EEStor application can help."

EEStor says that its patented system is a nontoxic, safe, and lower-cost alternative to conventional electrochemical battery technologies, offering ten times the energy density of lead-acid batteries. The company also claims that its system allows rapid and virtually unlimited charging and discharging without significant degradation of the unit. (See "Battery Breakthrough?") But many experts have been skeptical, citing the difficulty of working with the material at the core of the company's system: a ceramic made of barium-titanate.

A lack of news from the company has only fed the skepticism. The last public announcement from EEStor came last January, when it revealed that it had made high purity barium-titanate powders on its first automated production line. But the company has so far failed to deliver units of its storage product to minority investor ZENN Motor, a company based in Toronto that plans to use it in electric vehicles. Originally, the devices were to have shipped in the first half of last year.

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  • Is that redundant?
    Monsterboy on 01/22/2008 at 2:04 AM
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    "...offering ten times the energy density of lead-acid batteries at one-tenth the weight and volume."

    Wait. Does that mean that it's actually 100 times the storage for the same size, or are you figuring the multiplier in twice? I mean, if it's 10 times the density, of course it's 1/10 the size, for that level of storage. If that's the case, it seems a little misleading to say it twice.

    (If I get a raise from $20 to $40 an hour, and work half the hours, I'm not making twice the money in half the time, I'm making the same money in half the time.)

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    • Re: Is that redundant?
      kevbell on 08/19/2008 at 10:35 PM
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      I would also like this to be answered. Seems really important to me, as energy/volume is an important consideration. I assume it must be 10x not 100x though.
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  • EEStor for real
    Le Petomane on 01/22/2008 at 7:31 AM
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    I've said all along this was the real deal.
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    • Re: EEStor for real
      DJTal on 01/24/2008 at 11:36 AM
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      Well if it's true why don't they demonstrate it ..... if it's genuine people would all over them ...... where have we heard that before ? ..... or is this invention going to be all talk and no trousers ? .....hmmm...... or is going to placed under a National Secrecy Order for the next ten years like Pat Flanagan's 'Neurophone' because it's too much for us to handle ?
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  • Truth or Scam - We're all waiting
    nekote on 01/22/2008 at 2:47 PM
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    Certainly hope it pans out - not a scam.

    Everybody is anxiously waiting to see.
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  • Is this illegal?
    eestor_skeptic on 01/22/2008 at 3:22 PM
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    Just for argument's sake, say that EEstor is highly mismanaged, and they end up not following through with a single claim.  Would they have committed a crime?  What kind of penalties would they face?

    What if they are fully aware that they will not follow through with their promises?  What kind of penalties would they be facing?
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    • Re: Is this illegal?
      davea0511 on 04/11/2008 at 5:14 PM
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      Gimme a break.  You don't get to sue somebody because they got your hopes up.  It's attitudes like yours that brings innovation to a screeching halt.  Edison failed over 1000 times before he got the light bulb right.  You going to sue him?  Then shut your cake hole.
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      • Re: Is this illegal?
        modotx on 06/13/2008 at 8:18 AM
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        Yes you do sue someone for getting your hopes up for the sole intent of taking your money knowing that there was never a chance of a return.  Its called fraud.  Everyone always seems to blame the victim.
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  • nobody has seen anything yet
    enantiomer2000 on 01/22/2008 at 3:37 PM
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    Keep in mind that NOBODY outside of EEStor has seen anything yet, not even Lockheed.  Don't count on this until you have seen it with your own eyes.
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    • might have seen something
      asdar on 01/22/2008 at 4:24 PM
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      Nobody has come right out and said they haven't seen anything, that's what's so frustrating.

      In the Lockheed interview with the Volt website the rep from Lockheed carefully skirted answering the question of "have you seen a prototype" by saying they they haven't tested any EESTOR prototypes.

      Some of the other questions that were asked led me to believe that they have seen something. Something more than just pure material.

      When asked if this would have 10X the energy density of lead acid batteries he answered a simple and unequivocal "yes"

      If you've seen someone answer, "we haven't seen anything" then I stand corrected. What I've seen from everyone that's an insider is equivocation and never a simple yes or no.

      What would you see that would be enough to invest millions? To me I want to see how they plan on getting around the problems that Barium Titanate suffer.

      That could be something as simple as coated material that completely blocks the fields that cause BaTi to fail.

      I'd sure want to see something, and I imagine they did see something. They're almost certainly on a binding non-disclosure agreement, in which I'm sure they're forbidden from talking it.
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      • Re: might have seen something
        CapacitorMan on 04/04/2008 at 4:57 PM
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        If they have the BT particles coated with something, it will drastically reduce the very high permitivity they are claiming.  They cant have both.
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    • Re: nobody has seen anything yet
      biosubs on 05/20/2008 at 12:41 AM
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      Do you really believe that?

      I believe that everyone who has seen anything has already signed a non-disclosure agreement and they are not going to tell you or me what they have seen.  I also believe that both Kleiner Perkins and Lockheed either have on staff or have access to some of the brightest scientific and engineering minds in the world.  I think they have looked and they have seen something that tells them there is a decent chance that Weir's ESU will work.
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  • What about aspects invented by others?
    CJC_PE on 01/22/2008 at 7:51 PM
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    What is claimed as the EEStor invention is: “A method for making an electrical-energy storage unit comprising components fabricated by the method steps as follow…” It seems that they are claiming as their invention the method by which they combine the inventions of others.

    The ceramic composition that EEStor acknowledges as their basis material is covered by Pat. 6078494 Peter Hansen – U. S. Phillips Corp. Multilayer Capacitor Comprising Barium-Titanate Doped with Silver and Rare Earth Metal. This is described as "A capacitor ... characterized by a high dielectric constant ... and a capacitance with a low voltage dependence."

    It seems to me that the questions to be asked are:

    Are the claims for the performance of the underlying inventions valid?

    Does the performance of the combination equal the sum of the parts?
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  • fighting global warming would be more useful
    weee on 01/23/2008 at 4:27 AM
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    than equipping 'warfighters' with ever improved technology.
    With a global war on global warming going on I think most of us would prefer new battery technology to help on that particular crusade rather than any other.
    Plus ça change...
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    • Re: fighting global warming would be more useful
      MakeSense on 04/01/2008 at 7:27 PM
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      Don't forget that the U.S. military consumes 2% of the total energy used by this country. The military helps the environment and the climate and improves our security by finding effective power storage solutions. The military continues to seek electricity storage solutions for numerous vehicles as well as electronics.
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  • Going green first.
    cobraphx on 01/23/2008 at 9:36 AM
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    Keep in mind the customer getting the first production units off the assembly line isn't Lockheed, it's Zenn. They will be used in Zenn's NEV (neighborhood electric vehicle), so a "green" application is first on the block.

    And, there might be any number of reasons that there aren't any agreements announced with more mainstream automotive companies. Maybe no car company trusts that EEStor is real. Maybe EEStor wants to have an open playing field to stimulate competition among EV and PHEV mfgs. Could be EEStor wants too big a licensing payment to exclusively cover automobiles. Maybe the "high-school-type mistakes" are really show stoppers as stated in comments for the last EEStor article like this one:

    "I checked it myself to find the two classical, almost high-school-type physical mistakes:

    [1] Assumption of linear permittivity for high fields, which is not true for high-permittivity insulators, in particular, this Barium Titanate powder.
    [2] The alleged 12% reduction in permittivity due to the coating. "

    Also we haven't seen anything like an exclusive agreement to provide power cells for  laptops or power tools. Both of which would even better with this type of power cell. Your 18v cordless drill could be recharged in 2 minuites, and would run twice as long as the battery you have now. Some new devices would show up in the market that were never cordless before.

    But until EEStor delivers Zenn a working power cell, we'll just have to wait and see. Maybe Lockheed has seen something besides the patent that has been criticized here. It is possible the patent only covers key steps of reproducing their technology, but doesn't provide enough info to recreate their device.

    Lots of people said Nanosolar was a scam, and would never be able to deliver their product as well. Pretty sure they were wrong on Nanosolar, might be with EEStor as well.

    If the skeptics are right, EEStor has charmed another group. Not only have they pulled the wool over the eyes of Kliner Perkins and Zenn, now they have fooled Lockheed Martin as well, a company with a pretty strong background in cutting edge technology.
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    • Re: Going green first.
      biosubs on 05/20/2008 at 12:29 AM
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      Without getting into whether or not a commercial capacitor is ever produced, I question whether this technology would be useful for powering laptops, portable hand tools, etc.  The high energy storage is achieved by using a very high potential across the plates of the capacitor.  In the case of the ESU intended for the ZENN car, the potential is 3500 volts at full charge.  All of this requires somewhat sophisticated power electronics for both safely charging and safely powering the driven device with a constant voltage derived from a voltage source varying from thousands of volts to a dozen or so volts.

      The military version will use an even greater potential (perhaps double to around 7000 volts???  Probably a good reason why the civilian version will be developed first).  I'm not sure I would want to carry around a laptop or electric drill with a 3500 volt power source.  
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  • Why didn't you ask, Tyler?
    Franklin S. on 01/24/2008 at 5:22 PM
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    Why didn't you ask Zenn if THEY had seen a prototype, since Lockheed (foolishly, IMO) hasn't? So far, no one else has seen one.  Major figures in ultracap research are saying the patent assumptions about dielectric saturation for EESTOR's ceramic are flat out wrong, based on the kind of mistake made by people who haven't actually worked with the barium-titanate chemistry.

    The happy-go-lucky company managers (and major stockholders) of Zenn either have or have not seen a prototype.  Which is it?
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    • Re: Why didn't you ask, Tyler?
      WCHicks on 01/24/2008 at 8:57 PM
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      So why do you not email Ian Cliford and ask him yourself.  He will answer you.  He did me when I asked him that question.  He will tell you that due to a non-disclosure agreement that Zenn has sign with Eestor that he cannot confirm nor deny the existence of a prototype.
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      • Re: Why didn't you ask, Tyler?
        Franklin S. on 01/25/2008 at 12:15 PM
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        Because I'd rather you do it for me? 

        And now we have the answer:  No one, no one in the whole wide world, will acknowledge the existence of a working prototype. 

        As an ultracap scientist has noted,

        "The energy is not proportional to the voltage squared. That is EEStors problem. Energy is equal to 1/2CV2 only for linear dielectrics. Barium titanate is highly nonlinear, and the energy is approximately proportion to V, not V squared for a high field application like energy storage. EEStor only calculates energy storage -- never measures it, so they don't have to face this reality. By the way -- this creates a factor of several hundred difference between their calculated energy density, and the actual (which I have measured in the lab, and has been verified many times since)"

        AND,

        "The approach being taken is laughable. All of the "production milestones" are related to producing powders with a certain purity or eventually -- meeting a permittivity target. But the initial permittivity at low field doesn't matter a bit. The higher it is, the faster it drops with field. It would take less than two days work to make a small pellet of a current EEStor capacitor material, and actually measure permittivity versus electric field up to the breakdown voltage. Then you could see exactly how much energy is stored, and exactly how fast the permittivity decreases with field. Funny how this data is never taken."

        So, even just testing a small amount of the ceramic in front of an audience would show whether or not it can actually do what everyone else who has worked with barium titanate says it cannot.
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      • Re: Why didn't you ask, Tyler?
        CapacitorMan on 04/04/2008 at 5:01 PM
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        If there was a prototype, they would have measured the permitivity, and claimed the next milestone payment of $500K, which they have not.
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  • It's happened before
    cobraphx on 01/25/2008 at 4:32 PM
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    Everytime I hear this stuff about the math in the patent and experts in the field it reminds me of the Blue LED. Does anyone remember the birth of the Blue LED? It was perfected by Shuji Nakamura while working at Nichia (A small, pretty much unknown Japanese chemical company). Nakamura took a path most scientists in the field had discounted as unworkable. But this lone researcher and his hunch payed off.

    ---"Meanwhile, back in November 1993, Nichia announced its blue LED, promising at the same time that a blue laser was under development. Nichia's devices are made from an entirely different compound material, gallium nitride. The announcement caught the rest of the industry with its pants down. Gallium nitride had long been written off as fatally flawed. Making a diode requires both positive and negative types of material, and no one had been able to make positive-type gallium nitride."---

    -----" 
    Interview at: http://www.sciencewatch.com/jan-feb2000/sw_jan-feb2000_page4.htm
       SW:  What was it about zinc selenide that made it seem so superior?

       Nakamura: The crystal quality of zinc selenide is very good. The dislocation density, which is a measure of the number of defects in the crystal, was less than 10^3 per cubic centimeter. Gallium nitride was more than 10^10 per cubic centimeter. And when people wanted to make reliable LEDs and laser diodes, they knew that the dislocation density has to be lower than 10^3 or even 10^2. This is just physics.

        SW: That sounds almost insurmountable. How did you get around that defect problem?

       Nakamura: Well,first I needed a MOCVD reactor. MOCVD stands for "metal organic chemical vapor deposition." Since I had money now, I bought a commercial reactor and used it to grow gallium nitride crystals, but I couldn’t get them to grow on the substrate. So I spent two years modifying my commercial reactor and succeeded in making what I called the two-flow MOCVD reactor. Usually a MOCVD has only one gas flow. That’s a reactive gas that blows parallel to the substrate. I added another subflow, with an inactive gas blowing perpendicular to the substrate. That suppressed the large thermal convection you get when you’re trying to grow a crystal at 1,000 degrees. Using this two-flow MOCVD I succeeded in 1991 in making the highest quality of gallium nitride crystals in the world. The dislocatoin density was still 10^10. But there’s another measure of crystal quality, which is hole mobility, and I achieved a hole mobility of 200. That was a world record. The highest hole mobility ever achieved with gallium nitride was 100.

       SW:  So the two-flow MOCVD reactor was the key breakthrough?

       Nakamura: Yes—suddenly it was easy to make any type of gallium nitride. In 1991, I made n-type gallium nitride. The following year I succeeded making p-type using a thermal annealing technique. Now all gallium nitride researchers use my technique for p-type gallium nitride. Another big breakthrough was making the first single crystal of indium gallium nitride, which we needed for an emitting layer. Finally at the end of 1993, I succeeded in making the first commercial-based blue LEDs."------

    Seems to me industry expert's aren't always right. Especially when they say, "this material can't do x because of y". Same was said of gallium nitride, can't make a diode because of defects. Sometimes another property can be leveraged, or the side effect of a undesirable property can be mitigated like in Blue LED. Properties of materials change when talking about the nano-scale (EEStor is using barium titanate nanoparticles). Look at carbon nanotubes, a block of carbon is weak, but a bundle of carbon nanotubes is very strong.

    Keep in mind that there isn't a single advantage to EEStor to show anything to anyone outside an NDA. Can anyone name a single thing? Will you boycott their tech because they didn't prove it worked before it was commercially available? The market is so huge, they can't possibly meet demand if when they start production. They don't need to buy goodwill, or build customer confidence. By giving out information, they do risk other companies catching up to them. If you leak the key information about why it works in spite the math, how long would it be before one of the capacitor experts duplicated it? Of course this is all moot if their tech doesn't work. EEStor isn't Nichia, but it's possible that they are the next Nichia.
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    • Re: It's happened before
      GaryB on 01/25/2008 at 6:57 PM
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      There are indeed cases of the lone scientific hero, bucking the establishment and finally being vindicated by results.

      But, for every one of those "heros", there are at least 100 lone scientific turkeys, bucking the establishment and fading crankily into obscurity.

      I do hope they having something other than a bug in their power density spreadsheet. I can't see how it would hurt them to allow someone to say "we've seen a prototype" because, in theory, signing up customers implies the same thing, except it would also indicate that the customers weren't daft.
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      • Re: It's happened before
        biosubs on 01/31/2008 at 1:44 PM
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        Somehow, I don't get it.  The people at EEStor haven't taken a dime of public money and are asking for none.  They intend to have and, in fact, have little contact with the public and they say virtually nothing publicly.

        The whining and crying over the fact that Dick Wier at EEStor won't let the world look over his shoulder as he works to develop his ESU is monumental.  Mr. Wier has nothing to gain by talking and potentially a lot to lose.  He could say things that could invalidate upcoming patents or he could tell competitors things that might cut valuable time and costs from their lab work to do similar things.  What could possibly be his upside??  And Mr. Wier owes none of us anything and certainly nothing by way of explanation as to what he is doing or achieving or not achieving.

        The proof will be in the pudding and all of us outsiders will find out when we find out.  If, at the end of all this, Mr. Wier has produced nothing useful at all, I will personally be thankful for his effort and any knowledge that can benefit future researchers.  If the ESU works as predicted, so much the better.  And if the thing weighs twice as much and stores only half the power, it will still be a huge breakthrough that the engineers will tweak and improve over the coming years.

        Lastly, sometimes wonderful things come out of small labs because these labs have the freedom to explore outside the bounds defined by conventional wisdom (a la Nichia).  It could happen here or it might not.  All whining and crying aside, it is what it is.     
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        • Re: It's happened before
          JackSatan on 01/31/2008 at 3:44 PM
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          I generally would agree with the sentiment that "if they have nothing to gain by going public, why would they want to?", but in this case it is uber-wrong. If eestor's technology were verifiable, its value would be nearly limitless. Compare eestor to a123:
          a123 had technology which, while not remotely as fantastical as eestor's, was considered enormously valuable. So a123 lined up investors including Yankeetek, Sequoia Capital,Qualcom, P&G, OnPoint, Northbridge, Motorola, GE, FA Tech, Alliance Bernstien, etc. to raise, all told, more than $130 million dollars... this was done without selling off exclusives to anything at all. Contrast that to eestore, a company that if its technology is verifiable would be valued among the most valuable companies in the world(the total worldwide battery industry is in excess of $50 Billion, and eestore claims to be able to manufacture at specs significantly better than the most expensive batteries for a price of 1/10 the cheapest betteries - this does not count the huge increase in battery demand that would arise if this technology actually DID exist) eestore sold off 3.8% of their company to ZENN for $2.5 million - valueing the company at $65 million, with an option to sell an additional 7.6% of the company at the same terms. Furthermore, eestor agreed to allow zenn an exclusive license to their technology for electric vehicles. If eestor were anywhere near a working prototype with specs similar to what they claim, they would be out of their minds to take an offer that low for so much of their company... venture capitalists would be banging down their door begging for the opportunity to invest for a fraction of the price.
          So in a word, "yes" eestor had huge financial incentive to reveal a working prototype, and they didn't because they do not have one, and I would bet good money that even if what eestor claims is possible, they are not close enough to proving it to make it a rational investment at this time for anyone but the most idealistic investor... hence ZENN. (Yes I know Kliener Perkins invested in them, but that was a long time ago, and Kliener does not seem to have that much faith in the company anymore or it would have directed them to fellow VCs over a company like ZENN.)
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          • Re: It's happened before
            biosubs on 02/01/2008 at 3:11 AM
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            It's the owner's option as to how he does it.  This owner appears to want to maintain ownership/control.  I have heard that the owner sold the auto exclusive (actually a defined segment of that market) for cash instead of selling equity for cash and I think this was before the Kleiner deal. After the Kleiner deal, the owner sold equity to ZENN for cash with an option that would give ZENN an equity stake roughly equal to Kleiner's if the ZENN option were exercised.  In total, Mr. Wier has probably sold off or optioned around or slightly less than 20% of his company.  Certainly the remaining approx 80% does allow him to maintain control.

            I have no idea if the technology exists and if it does at what stage it is on a path towards commercialization.  It could be that the owner has not developed even a crude proof of concept model because he can't or he may be well on the road to a commercial model and hasn't shown it to outsiders because he doesn't think it appropriate.

            All us outsiders have to evaluate are some patent claims, a dearth of press releases and utterances by EEStor and a brief description of the ESU in the initial offering paperwork by ZENN (probably done well before there COULD have been any sort of prototype.  As to the patents, keep in mind that we live in a world where you can get a patent for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crust cut off (obviously not an obvious invention) so I am not sure what the claims and the paperwork are worth for early stage evaluation by outsiders.

            As to A123's investors which I take to include Yankeetek, Sequoia Capital, Qualcomm, Pa&G and the others, am I to take it that they made their investments on a charitable donation basis and took nothing from A123 in return?  I had thought that they might take equity or some other valuable consideration in return for their investment which would, one way or another, tend to dilute the founder's equ