The EEStory as Told by a Mysterious Blogger

This blog is really in its grandest sweep devoted to what I call the electrification of society. The means of accomplishing that goal, I argue is through the use of Thorium Fuel Cycle Reactors, and by LFTR is by far the superior Thorium cycle reactor design. One end of the energy story is the end of the power line that connects to electrical generators. The other end of the line and hence of the story is the way that electricity gets consumed.

Electrically powered cars, trucks, busses and trains hold the promise of replacing carbon based fuel powered vehicles in the not distant future. We need portable electrical storage for many transportation applications. So far batteries, including lithium-ion batteries have not proven capable of providing enough transportation range and energy storage amenities to throw off the shackles of the internal combustion engine. Hence the hybrid car and the plug in hybrid. The best we get with current battery technology is commuting range plug-ins. We need more range if the promise of electrical vehicle is to be fulfilled.

Enter EEStor, its super duper capacitor, and Richard D. Weir.

EEStor is an Austin technological "start up" headed by one Richard Weir. Before Weir got into the super duper capacitor business he engineered disk drives for IBM. Thus he could be said to posses respectable a business and product engineering background. Weir believes that he has developed a revolutionary capacitor technology.  

Weir had a revolutionary idea about electrical storage and co-founded EEStor in 2001 with a gentleman named Carl Nelson, another disk drive engineer/product manager. Weir and Nelson had previously co-founded disk-storage startup, Tulip Memory Systems. To date Nelson appears as a walk on in the EEStory. At any rate Weir began the circulate the claim that he had developed a revolutionary capacitor technology.

In 2004 when Richard Weir was looking for money, he used an incredibly obscure rout. He contacted an obscure publication called "Utility Federal Technology Opportunities" and gave it his basic sales pitch. The brief account of the EEStory pitched by Weir concluded:
Until now, electrostatic capacitors have not been considered for energy storage applications because of their low energy density characteristics. Capacitors applied to storage are based upon electrochemical and electrolytic capacitor technologies, which possess higher energy densities. EEStor's development proposition changes that premise by eliminating the inherent weaknesses of electrostatic technology for storage applications.

A number of major companies have said they would issue a purchase order quickly if specs are met.

The company is currently seeking equity investment of $3.5 million. A business plan is available.

Weir's pitch attracted the attention of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the crème de la crème of venture capitol firms. It is not clear who walked Weir through the door at Kleiner Perkins, but it good guess is that it would have been an Austin connection who believed in Weir's credibility. Weir got $3 million in working capitol, and an air of credibility. Kleiner Perkin's money paid of the beginning of development of a production line.

EEStor found another capitol source in 2004, an obscure Canadian manufacturer of glorified electrical golf carts, "Feel Good" Motors. Cross my heart and hop to die, I did not make the name up! Feel Good was soon to get a makeover as ZENN Motors, and Feel Good/ZENN owner Ian Clifford revealed himself to be a man of ambitions so vast that it is to big for Canada. Ian is a former professional photographer, who founded the first Canadian electric car manufacturing company because no one else had. If things work out for EEStor, Ian could well being as rich as Bill Gates. That would not be bad for an amateur auto industry executive who doesn't have an MBA, but then Bill Gates never completed college.

Which brings us to last year when the EEStiry began to get troubling. In January 2007, Toronto journalist Tyler Hamilton reported on the EEStory in Technology Review. Hamilton noted, "The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable." This word of caution has been reflected in Hamilton's followups on the EEStory, and in comments which Hamilton's followups have attracted.

Hamilton's January 2007 story included an indication that a product would be seen soon:
"The company announced this week that this year it plans to begin shipping such a product to Toronto-based ZENN Motor, a maker of low-speed electric vehicles that has an exclusive license to use the EESU for small- and medium-size electric vehicles."

To date no EEStor Electrical Storage Unit powered ZENN-mobiles have been seen zipping around Toronto. Clifford has spun a story of why this is the case. It is clearly a red flag that makes both ZENN and EEStor look bad.  ZENN which operates on a shoe string passed on $2.5 Million to EEStor, and is reported to have committed $5 Million more, once the ESU passes third party testing.   I am unaware of any reports that ZENN's $5 Million has arrived in Austin.  

There are other red flags. EEStor hype in a commenter on Hamilton's story stated, Unfortunately EEStor never made and will never make the supercapacitor described in the patent because they ignore a well known physical effect, called “dielectric saturation”.

CapacitorMan was even more pointed:

Good point. As someone who has worked in this field for decades, there are several areas that have been overlooked, in addition to the dielectric saturation:
1. The first, and greatest is the temperature coefficient on these kind of dielectrics, it drops 80% at the high temperature end,
2. The voltage stress will be 3 times what is typically allowed.
3. The failure mode for these types of capacitors is shorting, and that energy, if real, would release the equivalent of 100 sticks of dynamite.
4. To make the capacitor using low cost electrodes means firing in reducing atmospheres, which this type BT can't take
5. They cannot get the characteristics they claim with one micron grain size.
6. They ignore the law of mixtures-when they mix the two glasses, they will drop the K dramatically.

Thus there is some skepticism people who appear to be Electrical Engineering professionals. This is a red flag.

In December 2007, when I sat down at my computer to try figure the EEStory out, the red flags were obvious. This will turn out to be one of two stories. The first story will be a story of deception great deception, with self deception perhaps playing a key role. The second story would be of a great technological triumph by brilliant American inventors, Texans who made oil obsolete. That could easily be a top 10 story of the 21st century. I have yet to think of an in between.

I have yet to introduce the mysterious blogger who has taken up with some considerable tenacity, and somewhat lesser literary skills the EEStory.    I do not mean this at all in derision, often I write badly, so it would be absurd for me to cast stones.   Our mysterious blogger has offered an essay on his anonymous status.  He tells us that he does not want his blogging to be connected with his regular job,  he wishes to protect his family, and he does not want his mistakes to be remembered.   The last point would require a major work of commentary,  but I am going to let it slide today.

At any rate anonymous started his blog last year and mainly reposted stories he found on the Internet.  But then he posted an email address to which persons with inside information about the EEStory could respond. This brought EEStories which EEStor insiders wanted to tell. Some see the latest round of EEStories as confirmation that the basicEEStory is true. And as human hope ever overcomes caution, a bubble of speculative excitement seems to be building around the EEStor blog. But still no EEStor prototype has arrived in Toronto. The anonymous blogger is perhaps wise to not stand behind his or her account of the EEStory.

Update 7/25/08: A lot of people desperately want to believe that the EEStory is true. See the comment section of this post.