TheEEStory.com

Beta testing of http://TheEEStory.com has begun.

EEStor's Funding Stage Challengers

The history of the energy storage market is peppered with tales of stolen intellectual property. Such is the opinion of a person I spoke with recently who is familiar with the industry and knowledgeable about many of the companies within it. Given this historical blemish, market participants have had to adopt increased caution in bringing innovations into being. Typically, a company with something new goes through 3 main steps:

1) Develop the product so it actually works
2) Figure out how to build it cost effectively including beta and/or small runs
3) Figure out how to scale a manufacture ability so that you're able to do it consistently and reliably

Investments in startups in the space are often pegged against crossing these 3 milestones. But for any reasonable person embarking on this en devour, the challenge is establishing proof of accomplishment at each stage without revealing too much that could be leaked to other players. And when funding originates from a VC firm, even getting something off the ground can be a delicate dance of sharing information and hiding it. Add to this the regular gamesmanship that occurs in any market, where one competitor snipes at their rivals, perhaps occasionally in part to draw the other out to reveal some important piece of information and you've created sufficient conditions for a reliance on sleeping pills. In EEStor's case, it has had to battle an additional element in it's march to the marketplace: notoriety fueled by major claims surrounded by stealthy activities. This has ensured that there will be steady stream of doubt up until and if they make it all the way to the marketplace.

So, if you're an outsider looking in, how are you to make sense of all of this, especially since all of the scientific elements sparks such deep disagreement? What alot of people have done is relied upon Tyler Hamilton's work thus far as he's done a good job of balancing wild claims with insights from skeptics. If you go back and read Tyler Hamilton's well researched piece in MIT's Technology Review from Jan 07 you will see that he's brought reputable subject matter experts into the storyline. In this particular article, he spoke with Dr. Andrew Burke , a Research Engineer with a strong understanding of transportation energy systems. I had learned of Hamilton's mention of Burke only after googling a bit after my own conversation with Burke today.

Dr. Burke was willing to spend a considerable amount of time with me discussing his opinion of the EEStor efforts. I learned that Burke was hired to visit with Dick Weir onsite at EEStor and evaluate his claims for a company ready to invest millions of dollars in EEStor. I will be posting that interview in its entirety but essentially, Burke recommended against investment in EEStor to his clients because Weir "refused to give us any technical information that would confirm the dielectric properties of his materials." But Burke did mention that he was able to "replicate the calculations in the patent disclosure" saying that they were "pretty straight forward." Keep in mind what is generically true: many VC firms will not sign NDAs prior to a meeting. This many times causes a group seeking funding to severely reduce what they are willing to share in discussions and/or presentations.

If Burke was willing to lay out what it would take for him to believe Weir, another gentleman I spoke to would have nothing of it. John Miller, who runs JME Inc., a supercapacitor materials evaluation company in Ohio, also spoke with me at length and went much farther than Burke in condemning the whole EEStor project as "violating nature." Like Burke, Miller was hired to assist with evaluating Weir's claims on behalf of potential investors. Miller added that he has actually been hired 3 times to evaluate Weir's claims and each time advised strongly against it. In addition to speaking with me for a considerable amount of time, Mr. Miller has also published his thoughts on EEStor in an up coming article in the Winter 2008 BEST Magazine (Batteries & Energy Storage Technology). In that article, Miller says of the patent description that "capacitors cannot reliably operate near the breakdown voltage as claimed." He goes on to say that the technology "is not scalable, " has heat management problems and could not be constructed reliably.

Together, Burke and Miller represent respected subject matter experts in their respective fields who were hired to evaluate the claims of EEStor for purposes of ascertaining whether or not it was a reasonable risk to invest. After reading the interviews, you could possibly glean an understanding of what Kleiner's John Doer meant when he referenced a storage company that was Kleiner's "highest risk, highest reward" investment. So although Burke and Miller would not have invested in EEStor, Kleiner and Zenn did. Of course, this is not earth shattering since not every startup lands successfully every pitch to every VC.

To discuss this blog entry, visit http://TheEEStory.com

New Forums / New Article

Although I always catch grief for it but, I wanted to let everyone know I am working on a new article which will likely be posted tomorrow evening.

After some insightful conversations with various interested parties, I believe the best way forward for the near term is to post new articles to both locations with a link to the new beta site where comments can be posted. I will thus be shutting down comments on this blog in favor of moving discussion to a better blog/forum/chat format. It's not going to satisfy everyone's desires but early feedback is good from all who have seen it. Actually, I'll throw it out again...if you've been trying to get some content into an article shoot me an email and I'll let you be an alpha tester. (some of christine's research looks good but all are welcome)

In the event we run into technical glitches, we'll fall back to this site. Then until I can get all the blog posts migrated over to the new site...with comments, we'll run both sites in parallel. This will be nice for those of you who like to read the articles twice. :-)

Even More info from Tyler Hamilton on EEStor

In his blog, Tyler Hamilton provides additional information about his recent conversation with Dick Weir. Here's the link Hamilton says that Weir likened EEStor's work to the Manhattan II project. That's actually someting Dick told me as well last Friday. I'll post more information about that conversation now that Tyler has provided a good foundation.

Also, the Wall Street Journal Blogs mentioned the Hamilton EEStor piece this morning.

Related link from Jim Kingsdale's Energy Investment Strategies website.

Note: We will be transitioning to a new web platform in the coming days. We'll probably turn off comments on this blog but continue to post new content until a majority have migrated over to the new site. I'll be investigating ways to import the old content to the new site. Overall the plan will be to transition slowly---we will probably encounter bugs, unexpected issues, etc. But we'll work through them. Testing on the new platform is going well. I probably need about 3-4 people to help with a second round of testing so shoot me an email if you can assist. Actually, maybe I should combine a couple desires here. If you've contacted me about some content you want to get up on the blog, shoot me an email because you can throw it up in the forums and we'll see if you encounter any issues. email: eestorblog@gmail.com

New EEStor Forums

Tom Villars is helping me test out some forums software to improve the ability for folks to track discussions.   We're still thinking through a couple issues related to transitions but I think we should have the system up and running this week.   Feel free to offer any suggestions for Forum names and any other features you'd like to see.  

I need some help

If you have any experience migrating a blog from blogspot to a regular domain, can you shoot me a note? Looking for a clue with regard to google pagerank and SEO, etc. Wondering about dual posting blog entries, etc. shoot me an email to : eestorblog@gmail.com t h a n k s...

New Tyler Hamilton Article on EEStor Inc.

Tyler Hamilton has released a new article on EEStor Inc including several insights from Dick Weir on Technology Review, published by MIT. I want to focus in on a key excerpt concerning EEStor's status with regard to production expansion and information flow:

Weir says that momentum is building and that he'll start coming out with information about the company's progress on a "more rapid basis." Plans are also under way for a major expansion of EEStor's production lines. "There's nothing complex in this," he says, pointing to his past engineering days at IBM. "It's nowhere near the complexity of disk-drive fabrication."

Letter to Ian Clifford regarding "the science"

I think we had some good discussion yesterday in the area of understanding and/or speculating about what might be the underlying science behind EEStor's proposed innovations. With that in mind, a new thread posted on Google Groups came to my attention. I was wondering if the persons tackling all the science questions could have a read of this letter to Ian Clifford and then comment here on it's merits. My question for those in the know: does it summarize succinctly the scientific concerns or is it merely an aspect of a set of concerns? If you were writing to Ian Clifford to augment this letter, what else would you point out?

Note: the bottom of the thread seems to contain a person unhappy with the way comments are deleted here. Let me shed some light on that. The goal isn't to censor anyone or delete any content containing skepticism towards EEStor. Rather, the goal is to simply keep the discourse professional & respectable while leaving as much room as possible for idiosyncratic personality traits to leak in occasionally. :-) If a posting is deleted, it's probably violated the norms of ordinary social discourse by being highly inflammatory, overtly rude or vulgar. I'm still investigating a system to allow users to report these types of comments...until then, just shoot me a note if you find something distasteful: eestorblog@gmail.com PS. That i included this silly paragraph violates advice I keep getting from interested parties with alot of experience running forums--they advise simply dropping the issue and letting the overall content of the blog comments speak for themselves. Good idea.

San Francisco Chronicle on Zenn Motors

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on the Zenn low speed electric cars. Mentioned therein is Green Motors who has sold 36 cars since December.  The article states that this vehicle operates at a cost of 3cents/mile vs gasoline powered cars at 10cents/mile. 

Astonishingly absent from the article is any mention of EEStor.....orthis blog. :-) Guess someone needs to light up the comments section? 

Installing Intense Debate

I've been trying to add features to this blog to make it easier to follow comment threads but also to report inappropriate comments.  I found IntenseDebate and think it may do the trick for us. I tested it a bit on another of my blogs and everything seemed to work fine but when i installed it here, I freaked out because it set all the comment counts to 0, ie, I thought I lost all of the comments!  I was able to revert back to blogger's comment system though and all the comments were still there. I may try again tonite....so if any of you experience flaky behavior...that's whats going on.