Mea Culpa

When I started putting this blog together, I had a really modest goal:  organize some information about EEStor in a blog format so that people could find it easily, read and discuss it.  My attraction to the EEStory was not unlike many of you--skeptics and fans of EEStor alike--in that, I saw a bit of hope in the work being carried out at EEStor which could benefit alot of people around the world today and possibly free our economy and ourselves from dependency on oil.  The more I dug into the story, the more fascinated I got in large part because EEStor has held on to its secrecy for so long.  Many people sent me encouraging notes to continue to work to make sense of what is happening at EEStor. 

I got a lucky break in my efforts in that Dick Weir actually gave me the time of day to take a phone call from me.  He didn't have to do that.  I was attacked personally for making this claim and understandably some of that originates from my intention to maintain this blog anonymously and my admission that I own stock in Zenn Motors....but alot of it stems from a distinct lack of manners and civility and greed that lives in our culture unfortunately.   Mr. Weir has been nothing but kind to me in taking my calls and helping me understand what he was able to relay and still stay on course with his mission.   

Alot of people ask me, "what do you make of Dick Weir as a person, do you believe him?"  I say this truly, I like Dick Weir, I do believe him and I would like him even if this EEStor technology never comes to fruition. Why do I feel that way about someone I've never met in person but only spoken to over the phone?   Reason #1: Weir is a friendly soul.  My personal take on him, which I am sure other people will validate, is that he is not pompous, cocky, off-putting or in any way snooty, rude or combative. He's inviting, jolly, friendly and amusing--with a good sense of humor.   My read is he's not out to prove anything to anybody from a personality point of view.  I honestly think that we have a man here who has been plying away at a practice or trade for maybe 50 years with a discipline and focus that is uncommon except among pioneers.   So because EEStor has chosen to keep a low profile as they go through steps to develop their business--protect their IP, build out their production--that this implies they are scamming everyone?   Let me be very clear here:  if you talk with Dick Weir yourself, you will very quickly see that this is not the type of person who pulls scams. Make up your own mind on this but I am telling you, the reader of this blog, that I do not sense any shred of scam or hoax in Dick Weir at all. Zero. I'm not saying I am an expert at reading people but I have common sense.  And one thing I can tell you is that the way some people express themselves in the comments threads, even if they turn out to be correct about whatever it is they are trying to prove, I would not trust them.  Because, your character is a clue to your honesty and trustworthiness.

So, as I stand back and look at what has become of this blog, I can see that I have not done a good job of sticking to what I had originally laid out back in June when I said:

In the meantime, moving forward, I'm more than a little concerned about the level and quality of comments being posted on my blog.  What we all have in common is an interest in whether or not EEStor can deliver this amazing technology. We can disagree and even be cranky about each other's assessments of this. But I'd like to ask that everyone show a little more civility and class.  My blog is like my home. If I invite you in, act like a guest.  I'm going to hold off moving to a moderated comment format for now. My guess is there are always going to be a few people who go beyond polite skepticism and issue vulgarities to ruin the atmosphere. If it keeps up, I'll have to moderate the comments.  

Now, it seems to me I have made a mistake.  In my attempt to increase discussion, I changed the format of the blog to allow anonymous posting. And even among posters with recurring usernames, I have not stuck to my plan to try and keep the discourse on this blog civil. I would also like to thank Steve for making this clearer to me via email. He was right that anonymous posting and some of the comments posted should be deleted immediately. I am taking corrective actions on that now.  Anonymous posting is no longer permitted.  Further, I am going to make an effort to remove comments that are not respectful and/or offensive and I would ask help from readers to do this well. Simply shoot me an email with a link and reference to an offensive post, and I will delete it after considering the merits.  Now, of course, this is probably going to become unmanageable. So I may have to move to fully moderated comments only. Thats where all comments have to go to me in email and I have to manually approve each one.  I'm not a fan of that format because I believe real dialogue is hampered in part due to the time delays....but I'm going to try and maintain a clean blog here.   I'm asking for some help from the readers on this. 

So, taken altogether here, I'd like to apologize to EEStor and to Dick Weir, personally for not doing a better job of maintaining a blog worthy of being a source of information for EEStor. I think I can do a better job moving forward and restore some of the innocence that sparked my efforts to launch this blog.  And if you, the reader,  think these words from me sound strange, then consider this:  imagine you came up with  a great technology that could help many people, but as you stuck to your plans, kept your head down and moving forward,  people started to attack you personally--people who have never met you, calling you things which should only be reserved for unaccomplished slothful people....eventually it would wear you down.  And you know what, in Mr. Weir's case,  it's completely undeserved.   Before it's all said and done, if all goes well, the man may be awarded a Nobel prize for his breakthroughs. 

And I'd also like to apologize to readers who have been offended at some of the comments on this blog. Please email me any offensive comments and I will do my best to delete them. 

Invariably, some questions may arise as to why I deleted certain comments and not others. All I can say to you is if you had a comment deleted, it was probably disrespectful or contained content which included a personal attack.  I would invite you to direct your energy elsewhere to conduct yourself in that manner.  But I would also invite you to resubmit your comment devoid of personal attacks.  This can be a place where people debate, but it is my blog and I want to keep the discourse at a higher level. 

And I would pledge that if I can't operate this blog in a manner befitting it's subject matter, then I will have to close up shop which would be really disappointing to a lot of people. 

Finally, I don't need to run this blog.My main motivation is to increase awareness of what EEStor is up to in the hopes that in some small way, it could hasten it's arrival.  That's something on which even skeptics who comment here can agree with me. 

Instructions for Setting up EEStor Patent Updates

Good Friday Morning to all the European Patent Office staff who read this blog regularly. You may wish to call up your IT Support staff to check capacity, because you're about to get a wee bit of EEStor obsessed traffic.

Thanks to Tom Villars, the only non-anonymous reader/commentator on this blog, we have an excellent set of instructions for how to get automated EEStor patent alerts. You will get emailed alerts any time a patent application is updated. This of course will be no substitution for following the thorough and precise slicing and dicing, mincing and hair splitting that takes place here on this blog by the giants of the EEStory, Satya51, TVillars, and Marcus/Steve (who are actually brothers), RichTerm, BookemDano, Nekote and...and last perhaps most, the 875K readers known as anonymous. Thank you, anonymous. Here's an enjoyable blog post about EEStor for you, anonymous. Enjoy.

Stock Talk

I wanted to start a thread here on the stock movement today. Anyone care to post some analysis or theories about what happened, will happen, might happen, etc?

Also, on a related note, Ive been curious and others have emailed me wondering to what degree it's possible to learn what institutional investors may be invested in Zenn. Any way of learning that through proper channels? Also, does anyone recommend a stock quote embedding widget? I've tried to add one here previously but could never find one that looked good.

Note: for this thread, I'm going to make sure it stays on topic by removing posts that may have better life elsewhere on the blog. Warning complete. -thanks!

UPDATE: within the comments thread, we have this link to a clip that aired this evening on BNN. Good discussion about Zenn's upside potential if EEStor pans out with a rarely recognized reality that even if it doesn't, Zenn has some downside protection.

EEStor Announcement Ultracap Recap

With regard to EEStor's recent announcement of production and purity milestones, here's a little recap post for easy access to the various postings.

1) Links to original press release and coverage
2) Follow on Interview with Richard Weir
3) Interview with Edward Golla, 3rd party reviewer
4) Zenn's subsequent press release
5) Some technical discussions of the release and related topics.
a) reader Mihkel
b) reader Zawy
c) Prof Randall
6) A charity I support

UPDATE: I'm getting emails that the picture in this post is of an EEStor cell that has "mysteriously" appeared on wikipedia. (i just linked to it) I've seen this before though..I dont think it is an EESU because it looks like it was made from powder that was way too impure to produce an EESU. :-)

A couple format changes

In an attempt to draw even more skittish but possibly insightful souls into the various dialogues here, I am running a little scientific experiment of my own. I flipped on anonymous posting, thus eliminating the need to set up a blogger account to comment here. As a result though, it could introduce undesirable content so I turned on capta too. I already see some persons taking advantage of anonymity. I posted also a more thoroughly spelled out version of this blog's disclaimer implied herein previously.

Not a few people are uncomfortable with blog or forum formats such as these. Some people want everything on record and everyone accountable for everything they say. I can see the need for it in certain environments but in a blog, what we're all trying to do here at least is sift through information to arrange coherent narratives to make sense of EEStor and its potential impact on the world or us. Some speech is inherently theoretical even if not identified as such when uttered or written. On this blog, that is evident from the fact that people occasionally delete their comments later. Finally, to reiterate what's been said again and again: do not rely on information on this blog to make investment decisions--consult a professional. No information is offered here or should be construed to help you make decisions about investments. The author if this blog has no special relationship with Zenn or EEStor, has no relations with anyone who has a special relationship with Zenn or EEStor. The single unifying purpose of this blog has been only to centralize information about EEStor and facilitate discussion regarding EEStor and it's many proposed benefits and advantages over various battery markets.

Professor Clive Randall Follow Up

In a prior post, I mentioned that a reader had brought it to my attention that Clive Randall who is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State University had expressed concerns about the information found in the eestor patents. I was able to speak with Prof Randall today. First, for the time being, he will take a pass on posting information here in regards to EEStor. Second, Prof Randall has reviewed portions of this blog and specifically comments on some of the posts. He believes that some of the persons who have posted comments laying out the scientific community's concerns with EEStor's claims, specifically as read in the patents are "bang on." To frame this appropriately, Prof Randall recognizes what may not be obvious to many, ie, that patents are not scientific articles with trappings such as peer review. But again, from Randall's view some of the commentators on this blog have laid out accurately what the challenges are for Weir and team from a scientific point of view.

We had a good conversation and covered related topics but Randall's views on anything other than the above will need to come from him unless he changes his mind. For the record, I politely as possible tried to repeatedly draw him into further discussion here. He understands that this is an open and ongoing invitation....which actually, since he declined is open to any and all.

I can appreciate Randall's situation and in general, anyone's apprehension with taking part in a blog forum such as this. I'm sure I share with many this similar apprehension.

But again, if you're a skeptic and think some information about EEStor is not receiving enough attention, don't be shy. contact me: eestorblog@gmail.com ....especially if you think you are the person Randall believes is "bang on."

Richard Weir Says Permittivity is Subset of Purity, Prototypes built/tested

I just spoke via phone with Dick Weir for about 5 minutes. It was a very typical conversation in the sense that he was at times jovial and others mildly irritated with me. I could tell he was determined not to let the conversation stray from simply commenting on the press release, to explain what's in there.

Blogger: some people are wondering if your use of the term "milestone" in the press release relates to investment payments or investment milestones.

RW: No. Milestones of production and chemical purity.

Blogger: Why would you issue a press release on something related to purity prior to permittivity?

RW: It all leads to that. Everything we got there is the holy grail of everything we've worked for here. Permittivity, it seems to me people overconcentrate on it. Permittivity is a subset of getting these. If you dont get these, you dont get the permittivity. If you
get these, you get the permittivity and you can set it up at very high levels. This allows us to meet present specifications but more importantly or equally, it's the pathway for future advancement. In 2007, we made a conscious corporate decision to put in our advanced technologies. Of course, thats going to take a little longer! But we did that with very good reasoning behind it. As it states there, there are some mission critical programs out there that we wanted make sure that we could meet. Now what we had (prior to our advanced technology) could certainly meet alot of the programs. Putting our advanced technologies in place...this is why we are so happy.....because this shows the success of our advanced technologies. "

Blogger: Does that mean from a production standpoint that....

(interrupting)
RW: We were [funded].....say this on the blog.....we were [funded] to put a production line in. So what we are putting in here is a production line. (production said slowly and with emphasis)

(note: Weir said "invested in" but probably reads better as "funded"?)

Blogger: Not a lab?

RW: No, we've already done all the R&D and preproduction on this a long time ago. Now our [funding is] to put a production line in. This press release was put out to tell the people of our production successes that we have had.

Blogger: I hate to bring this up because I feel like I'm pretty clear on the information that's out there in regards to what you're saying about production. But still, alot of people still think that you haven't even got a prototype.

RW: We've have made prototypes of this and those have....they were made with technologies that we had at the time. And what I'm telling the people today is in 2007 we made a corporate decision to put in more advanced technologies which we now and this data shows that we hit a home run on these technologies. Prototypes have been built and prototypes have been tested.

Blogger: tested by 3rd parties?

RW: I'm just going to say that. They've been tested and the data has been reviewed by a lot of people.

Blogger: are you following any of the discussions on the web?

RW: [scoffing] I dont follow any discussions. I get to work, get my ass to work and get things done around here. What people say has no meaning to me. What we put out there I thought was dynamite and go from there. Anyway, that's all I can say. Thank you very much.

Blogger: .....one last question, people want to know if Moore's Law.... [phone click]

Thoughts? What's my take? I think someone smarter than me should piece this together. On the one hand, we have all the skeptics beating the permittivity drum with Weir saying essentially that he's focused on production issues not lab or R&D issues. You be the judge.

Richard Weir on EEStor's announcement

Cleantech has acquired some comments from Richard Weir on yesterday's announcement:


here's the link.

thanks mrjerry

Zenn Follow Up to EEStor Press Release

Zenn Motors issued a press release today to say that yesterday's EEStor announcement "bodes well" for the next milestone of 3rd party permittivity. Zenn took the opportunity to elaborate on a few other items that are often asked/discussed here, eg, Zenn's stake in EEStor, the scope of Zenn's exclusive rights deal, and the ZENNergy drive system.

Reader Mihkel on EEStor Purity Announcement

Here's another interesting technical dissection of from todays blog comments...this time from Mihkel.  Again, I just want to pull out some of these technical comments and separate them from the discussion of zenn stock, etc.  My hope is other technical folks will add to the commentary and even, hopefully, add a little relief in terms of providing some plain english verbiage that average joes like me can follow. 

Mihkel said...

Word wraps removed (sorry for 2x post).

While considering solid state electrical energy storage device's (capacitor's) ability to store energy, maximal upper bound for volumetric energy density (energy per unit of volume) can be obtained knowing only operating device's dielectric's permittivity and (operating) electrical field strength. If we allow dielectric's material density (mass per unit of volume) to be known, we have one more energy storage characteristic: gravimetric energy density (energy per unit of volume).

So, formulae for both type of characteristics are:
volumetric: Uv = ε*E^2/2,
gravimetric: Ug = Uv/ρ = (ε*E^2/2)/ρ,
where
U - Energy density,
ε - actual permittivity of substance,,
E - Electric field,
ρ - material density.

ε and E can be calculated: E based on article and ε based on information known before. ρ can be obtained by encyclopedia lookup and making some assumptions. ε = εr*ε0 where εr (or k) is relative (to free space) permittivity of dielectric and ε0 permittivity of free space or the electric constant. Then take the voltage and divide it by the distance it was applied over (over dielectric's thickness) and you get E (E = U/l).

Now we can get computable formulae for a given dielectric considering source data available to us:
volumetric: Uv = εr*ε0*(U/l)^2/2,
gravimetric: Ug = Uv/ρ = (εr*ε0*(U/l)^2/2)/ρ.

I must emphasise we are considering only maximal bounds based on given numbers (not it's production feasibility) about dielectric. To ceramic capacitors, this bound depends only on dielectric's characteristics.

Let's get now source data. U = 350 V and l = 1 µm we take from the article. εr = ~18k has been stated before. For barium titanate, ρ = 6.02 g/cm^3 can be taken from Wikipedia, but we make a wild assumption here, that the actual material has the same density as barium titanate. ε0 can taken from any table of physical constants (ε0 = ~8.85 * 10^(-12) F/m).

Filling formulae with data and letting google's compute engine step into play, we have:
volumetric: Uv = ~2700 Wh/l
gravimetric: Ug = ~450 Wh/kg
(Verify:
Uv – http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENXX252&q=18000*8.85*10^-12F%2Fm*(350V%2Fmicrometer)^2%2F2+to+Wh%2Fl&btnG=Search
Ug – http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENXX252&q=(18000*8.85*10^-12F%2Fm*(350V%2Fmicrometer)^2%2F2)%2F(6.02g%2Fcm^3)+to+Wh%2Fkg&btnG=Search )
:

To put these numbers into perspective, consider enerergy density of current production lithium-ion energy storage: Uv = 270 Wh/l and Ug = 160 Wh/kg.

The key point to make such numbers available is EEStor's proprietary technology achieving dielectric material with outstanding properties, namely: Electrical field E = 350 V/µm (at production level) while maintaining permittivity εr (or k) = ~18k. At field 350 V/µm, one has to watch for two types of breakdowns: electrical and permittivity. 1st one occurs if dielectric (insulator) becomes conductor due to field's strength, 2nd one is the natural property (until EEStor proves wrong?) of high-k (high relative permittivity) dielectrics to loose their permittivity in high field strengths (orders of magnitude below 350 V/µm). I suspect the 1.1 kV/µm stated in the article is the lower one of the two.

This remains the point over which scientific community remains sceptical. EEStor seems to have resolved this problem some time ago and seems to deal with production issues.

To get some clue how these hypothetical maximum bounds relate to real world, one has to take into account that ceramic capacitors need also conductive plates sandwiched between dielectric layers. This makes Uv and Ug smaller, because you have to take plate material into account, which does not store energy. There are also packaging and structural materials, electronics, etc... They also use fields 350 V/µm instead of 1.1 kV/µm (as stated in the article) because of manufacturing process' mistakes and impurities in some points of dielectric material, which brings the electric field value for the two (possible) breakdowns down.

Imagine, if you can enhance the manufacturing process and rise operating electric field from 350 V/µm to somewhere higher? You get a nice boost in energy density, as it is quadratically (as seen from the formulae) proportional to electric field.