Why did we acquire SolRayo?

By acquiring SolRayo, and with its win of the grant from Wisconsin Energy Independence Fund (WEIF), much of our our cash expenses for the ultracapacitor effort will be covered. This will allow us to concentrate and accellerate both our development and marketing efforts.

SolRayo is an LLC based in Wisconsin and was founded by the same researchers who invented our ultracapacitor technology.

We’ve been paying the inventors and the University of Wisconsin for their help in developing the technology. This makes sense, since these are the people that came up with the idea and know the technology best.

Earlier this year, WEIF announced the availability of grants from the state to help pay for companies to establish renewable energy operations in Wisconsin. One of the requirements was that the applying company must have matching funds in the form of either “cash, in kind or other” contributions.

Since we've been doing ultracapacitor research in Wisconsin and since SolRayo is an established Wisconsin entity, we suggested that we would take a controlling interest in SolRayo if they applied for and won the grant. In exchange for the controlling interest, we will provide the "cash, in kind or other" contributions over the next 18 months.

The award was made, we formally acquired 50.01% of SolRayo and the state will provide $250,000 in grants to SolRayo.

This is a win for us – the state pays for much of the effort we would otherwise have had to pay for – and a win for the state of Wisconsin – they get Wisconsin people working on energy projects.

Our friends at the University of Idaho, who are working on the microbattery technology, recently published a technical paper on their progress in the Journal of Power Sources.

To read it, one has to purchase a copy of the paper (or subscribe to the Journal), but an abstract can be found here.

Although it's not included in the abstract, the article contains a nice acknowledgement of Enable IPC's technology and support.

Power Engineering, part 2

Dr. Daugherty has written a follow-up to our article in Power Engineering's online newsletter. In it, he discusses how nanotechnology may help achieve "grid parity"; that is, the point where photovoltaic electricity is the same price as grid electricity. Here is a link to the article.

Power Engineering

Power Engineering, a magazine that is popular among power plant managers, engineers and others in the power generation field, publishes a periodic online newsletter. Their latest issue featured a short article co-written by Dr. Mark Daugherty, our Chief Technology Officer, and me. The article covers some of the ways nanotechnology addresses alternative energy concerns.

Here's a link to the article:

http://pepei.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?article_id=337025

A short microbattery update . . .

Lately, there’s been a substantial amount of focus on our ultracapacitor technology, and deservedly so. With our new IMDEA agreement and the first commercial use of the technology, it deserves to be showcased a little. And we’re thrilled about the attention it’s receiving.

In the meantime, our nanowire-based microbattery technology continues to move along. Our first overall performance goal was to make a device smaller than a postage stamp that hit a certain target power level.

The good news is that we've met that performance spec in the lab -- but the better news is that we've done so at a very low cost. Others in the industry tend to use expensive processes (e.g., sputtering machines, vacuum chambers and the like). We have done this almost entirely on chemical benches. The process is very inexpensive.

The fact of the matter is, if anyone is going to embed a battery into a credit card (or similar item) to power a small display and/or microchip, the price of that battery is going to need to be very low; mostly because the users won't pay anything up front to get the card (in many applications). It looks like we will be able to meet the low price expectations.

So, what remains for us is packaging, and a whole lot of testing, which are not small tasks. We have one group of researchers working on packaging while the others in the lab think that, with a couple tweaks, they can double the microbattery's power output . . . they're working on that angle.

In a few days, we plan to issue a corporate update with some additional detail on this and some of the other things happening at the company.

Not invented here

In business school (and elsewhere) you hear a lot about the "not invented here" syndrome. Recently we came across some examples of it.

Two weeks ago, an associate and I met with the managing director of a large brokerage firm in downtown L.A. He told us of a company that was a leader in the computer components industry. One day, some researchers introduced a new technology that promised to significantly improve the performance of their products.

They chose not to adopt the new technology, and to stick with what had served them well for so long. Their competition adopted the new ideas and soon took over the leadership position in the industry.

Yesterday, the same associate and I met with an executive of a company that has been #1 in their industry (not computer components) for several years. He told us that he hoped his competition would continue to thrive because their existence kept his researchers motivated to incorporate improvements into their products.

One company suffered from the "not invented here" syndrome and is no longer a leader. The other doesn't and maintains its competitive edge. An obvious lesson.

A million cycles and counting

We just announced that our ultracapacitor device has withstood over 1 million charge/discharge cycles, with acceptable degradation (i.e., it has retained over 80% of its original capacitance).

This is one of the areas where ultracapacitors tend to out-perform batteries. Isidor Buchmann's book, Batteries in a Portable World, reports that the cycle life (i.e., to 80% of the battery's initial capacity) of various commercially-available batteries can range from as low as 50 cycles to 1500 depending on the chemistry (p. 29). In our investigations of microbatteries, we have seen reports of cycle lives as high as 80,000 and higher for very low power devices.

Ultracapacitors, however, have typically been much higher than batteries. 500,000 cycles is not uncommon. Many devices advertise over a million cycles.

To see ours reach this milestone is very exciting. In actual practice, it means that (considering the applications we're targeting) we're in very good shape!