Mr. Reed: The company was founded in 1992 by Marty Klein, who continues to serve as our Chairman and also as our Chief Technologist. He, in fact, was the CEO until recently, spending the past 13 or 14 years developing the current technology, which is the core of our business technology. The company has been involved in the development of advanced battery systems, particularly for the Department of Defense, using a proprietary and patented bipolar battery technology and applying it to a wide variety of military development opportunities, as well as to energy storage applications with research funds from the Department of Energy. The company has developed this technology with about $30 million of government funding, and now we are planning to take that technology into commercial opportunities as we grow the business.
TWST: What makes your battery systems superior to those of competitors?
Mr. Reed: The primary technology that we have is a bipolar battery
design, and the best description of this is that the battery cell itself
is a flat wafer construction that has the contact surfaces on the top
and the bottom or the two opposite sides, so that when you stack these
wafers, it looks much like a stack of cards; you build to higher and
higher voltages to whatever cell voltage you need in a particular
application, and then the size and shape of the cell itself is based on
or dictated by how much capacity you need or the shape of the physical
installation of the battery. The significant difference of this bipolar
design is that other cylindrical and prismatic battery constructions
have tabs on the perimeter of the cells with which you connect the
positive and negative plates from cell to cell, and then you connect
adjacent cells together with additional hardware connecting the cells to
form batteries. This hardware around the perimeter takes more space, it
adds weight, it adds a number of components and complexity of the
assembly operation. The bipolar design, by the nature of its
construction, is inherently smaller, lighter, less complex to
manufacture, and therefore, has a lower manufacturing cost. And although
we've done our primary development in nickel metal hydride chemistry, we
believe it can be applied to any other chemistry such as the more
advanced lithium ion chemistries that are under development today.
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