At some point, this became a bit of an obsession and my hope that EEStor had what they claimed probably outpaced my ability to generate a prudent amount of skepticism. Fortunately, when I created the forums at TheEEStory.com, the skepticism came in ample supply from multiple contributors, some of whom came and left and others who just hung around. But the largest source of doubts about EEStor's claims came from time itself.
So, here we are now in 2015 and although we're told there might be something unique and useful to regular capacitors, no one is talking about the super-battery any more. Well, to me, that was the justification for having a blog about this company and its claims. Absent that, it is just like any other company in most ways. Of course, EEStor is also and will always be unlike any other company in how it was funded and operated and watched due to this blog in some significant way.
The question now has become is there anything here that's worth the time? Ironically, the best thing possibly to come from this blog may be a fictionalized account of my experiences operating it in a television series I'm still helping Michael Blieden to create. So that project will hopefully come together. But if it doesn't, that's ok too.
It was recently proposed to me that possibly in the near term, I could take a tour of EEStor's facility. Five years ago that would have been a dream come true but today, I don't really think I could work it into my schedule. If I had to listen to Dick Weir's un-decypherable bullshit, I'd probably lose my lunch.
As for stressing over EEStor and looking for what's next, those days are way behind us and from my perspective, the whole thing has become a colossal waste of time and distraction. To get to the heart of things, this blog has become to me personally a recurring set of disappointing developments. It's impacted me emotionally and I used to be able to counterbalance that with enjoyment from the community that built up around EEStor. But that community has always been dwindling as it should from EEStor's failure to deliver on their self-set goals.
On top of this, I think eight years of emotional disappointment is just too much to continue to slow brew. I have a lot of other things I want to accomplish in my life and maintaining a scientific debate community is no longer one of them. It is just too distracting so take this for what it is: a bit of Spring cleaning in my life and my attempt to get my focus back.
So of course, no one will be satisfied with how this all ends up. But in keeping with how I've done things from the beginning, I will end with some of my personal speculations and issue some new predictions.
First, I believe Carl Nelson worked on a team at MIT under Arthur Von Hippel that discovered a capacitor effect which had off the charts measurements--an effect whose limits were not apparent to them then or to EEStor now. I believe the MIT team couldn't control the effect with the manufacturing methods available at the time and had bigger fish to fry with the development of the digital age. That digital age improved manufacturing methods and at some point Dick Weir and Carl Nelson set out to see if they could bring about the effect originally discovered at MIT. Weir's ambitions were bigger than his technical ability and extreme narcissism drove Nelson out of the picture and left the technical development in uncertain hands. To make matters worse, the controls Weir and team thought they had over the material turned out to be illusory. What's left now is the possibility that the effects which are controllable are commercializable as well.
I definitely believe innovation in the capacitor realm could come from improved manufacturing methods. But can it produce the type of super-battery EEStor proposed to build? I don't know. EEStor's work product thus far strongly suggests *they* can't build it.
What about all of the original intrigue with Kleiner Perkins and Lockheed hovering around EEStor? Does it amount to much? I can't rule out that an energy storage technology breakthrough would spawn a government lead secrecy campaign complete with counter-narrative, etc. What I do believe now though is that EEStor is not in any way seriously thought of by Lockheed as possibly delivering a breakthrough of the proposed magnitude.
So for all of these reasons, I am declaring finally that T'day is the day.
-B
PS Ok, for those who must know, yes, I'm still fully invested and have never sold any shares. Mentally, I've written it off as a loss but you never know!!! MUAHAAHAAAHAHAHA!!!!
