Energy Crisis Management: New technology enables...

LYDIA MAZZIE: My name is Lydia Mazzie.
I work in international engineering operations, and
I'm responsible for setting up offices around the world for
Google, engineering offices.
So I came across these guys a year ago while attending an
emerging technology forum for Russian
and Ukrainian startups.
And we had this idea to bring them in here and present it to
you guys the technology that they're working on.
So Jim Nickerson is an interim CEO.
He has many years of experience, as in 20 plus
years of experience, in ultracapacitors industry, or
high tech industry, and made most recently in
ultracapacitors.
And I think last year, he spent at Maxwell Technologies.
And Vladimir and Sergey will be available for questions.
They're investors in the company.
So with this, I'm going to hand it off to Jim.
JIM NICKERSON: Thank you Lydia.
Let's just turn this one off, I think.
LYDIA MAZZIE: Great.
You have your own.
JIM NICKERSON: They gave me my own.
Good afternoon.
My name is Jim Nickerson.
As Lydia mentioned, I've been in the technology industry for
more than 20 years.
Much of my career was here in the Valley.
I was in the semiconductor industry working for National
Semiconductor, and [? XR ?], and others.
But about 10 years ago, I was introduced to the technology
called ultracapacitor.
I'm not sure if you've been keeping up with that.
This talk is described as energy crisis management using
a new technology to enable some of the current
alternative energy options that are being bandied about.
To call it a new technology is a little bit of a misnomer
because the first ultracapacitor, if you go back
to a Radio Shack self-help guide that they published in
1967, they showed how to build an ultracapacitor using paper
towels and lemon juice.
So the technology, the idea of a double layer capacitor, has
been around a long time.
It's just been trying to get that technology to a point
where it's actually usable by other industries other than
people that read Radio Shack publications.

So the problem that the ultracapacitor is trying to
address is the fact that as we have watched the global energy
crisis developed, one of the things that's come out of that
is the idea that we need to find more efficient ways to
use the energy that we have, rather it be oil, or solar, or
wind power.
We need to be able to most efficiently use that energy as
it's generated.
So this technology of ultracapacitors is designed to
help enable that type of technology by providing a high
power burst capability to provide fast charging and
discharging type technologies and then also to enable peak
load leveling.
One of the biggest problems in the energy industry is how do
you generate power, for example, solar power?
It's easy to get power during the day, but at night it's
pretty difficult.
So the ultracapacitor is a technology that on a smaller
scale, and even to some extent on that scale, enables you to
balance your power and energy so that you can deliver power
at times when it may not be most efficiently available.

So if you look at the common technologies, you'll see
conventional batteries in the big yellow galaxy up there.
And you can see that looking at that, if the left hand axis
is energy density, the bottom axis is power density, so how
much energy can you store versus how much
power can you deliver.
Conventional batteries reside up there
in that yellow galaxy.
Fuel cells as they're are being developed are even
further up in the left hand corner.
A conventional capacitor which discharges very quickly can
give you a lot of power but very quickly.
So it doesn't have much energy storage capacity.
So the ultracapacitor, the red galaxy there, lies in the
midst of all that as a technology that will help you
bridge from one application to another.
Many applications use batteries, many use
conventional capacitors.
But those are often times sized for the opposite axis.
For example, if you need a lot of energy capacity, but you
have a capacitor-type power delivery requirement, you may
have to use two large a capacitor for your application
just to hold the energy you need.
Or you may have to oversize your battery because you need
to deliver more power than you want to.
So this is kind of the top of the universe that we're
talking about.
Comparing them side by side, I won't go through all this in
great detail, but if you look at a battery, an
ultracapacitor, and a capacitor, you can see that
there's orders of magnitudes of
difference in the two columns.
Some of the critical ones are the cycle life where a battery
can be charged and recharged on the order of
thousands of times.
Ultracapacitors are in the hundreds of thousands of
times, primarily, because a battery is a chemical device,
and an ultracapacitor is a mechanical device.
It's just moving ions and pushing them back and forth,
so there's no breakdown of a chemical.
The efficiency of charging and discharging, in other words,
if you charge it and discharge it, how much efficiency can
you get in that cycle?
The ultracapacitor and the standard capacitor are much
higher than what you can get out of a battery.
Now there are some new battery technologies, lithium ion
technologies, that are very expensive.
They're pushing up the top end of that 85% for batteries.
But you still have to keep in mind that most of these
applications are cost-driven.
So you have to keep that in mind.
The other thing is because of the mechanics of charging, a
battery take typically takes hours to charge, where an
ultracapacitor takes seconds, and a capacitor you can do
almost instantaneously.
And another nice feature for the ultracapacitor is you can
operate it much lower temperatures.
So if you're in a car that's having a hard time starting
with a battery, you can easily start it with an
ultracapacitor if you're living in Minnesota.

This is a kind of a model of how an ultracapacitor works.
It's much like a battery.
You have a positive and negative electrode.
You have charged ions in the electrolyte.
When you close a switch, they go to the opposite poles, and
they're stored there.

This is the electrode.
The important part is how many of these ions can you store in
the electrode.
So where a battery might have a plate there and the charge
is stored on the flat surface of a plate, an ultracapacitor
has almost like foam or a sponge, so there's all sorts
of nooks and crannies, so you can put many more ions in
against the electrode, hence the higher
ability to store energy.
This is an equivalent circuit, and all that's meant to show
you is that in an ultracapacitor, because you've
driven those ions into this three-dimensional electrode,
it takes a little bit to pull out of it.
So you have some internal resistance to
pulling that out.
So you need to think of an ultracapacitor as being
capacitors and resistors in series.

When you build an ultracapacitor, you have two
current collectors, an electrolyte.
Your electrode is your porous, normally carbon-type material.
You see there is the yellow circles.
And then the electrolyte is what is
immersing the whole thing.
There's a separator between the two.
So the separator is what's keeping your positive and
negative apart once you've started charging it.
Now one of the things that you have to keep in mind is that
this electrode material is very dense.
And this is what normally other industries be called a
starved cell in that there's so little electrolyte in there
that if you punch a hole in it, nothing will drip out.
It's so starved.

So what are the major applications for using an
ultracapacitor?
If you think of an application's use of power,
many types of applications--
and I'll use an old one.
We were talking today that it's a little outmoded because
Blackberry has gone well beyond that.
But their original two-way pager, the Motorola two-way
pager, you would have a constant requirement for
power, and then you press the button, and all of a sudden
you get a burst of power requirement to do a transmit.
And then it would wait for a little bit,
then you burst again.
There are many types of applications that you could
apply to this.
You could apply this to a car.
Cars traveling along, all of a sudden you need to accelerate,
you step on the gas, and you need a burst of power.
So this is just kind of a generic description of what an
application might look like.
And normally, that application has some constant power
supply, a battery, an engine, a fuel cell, just about
anything, that's applying purposely a
standard level of power.
And you have to size the power so that it's always above your
minimum requirement, the bottom red line there.
And you want to try to accommodate your burst
requirements.
So maybe in reality, 80% of the bursts of power required
in this application might actually come in below the
black line.
But it's the occasional one that goes above that is really
going to damage your energy supply.
So what the ultracapacitor does when you put that
together with this system is the ultracapacitor stands by
and fills those gaps whenever it's required.
Now it may not seem intuitive, but if the black line is a
battery, a battery has a resistance to delivering
power, so you just can't say give me x number of watts
immediately, because the battery has resistance, and it
resists discharging that power.
You've probably seen that in many types of applications.
The ultracapacitor, because its resistance is so much
lower than a battery when put in parallel with the battery,
that load sucks the energy out of the ultracapacitor rather
than the battery.
So the battery goes along, and it doesn't even know what
happened because the ultracapacitor
took care of it.
And we'll talk about that effect a little later.
Now there's the opposite side of this spectrum.
What if your power requirement is constant?
What if you're a hospital?
What if you're any type of computer system or RAID backup
type system, et cetera?
We all know that the power company is not very good at
giving us very clean power.
Now on this scale, these dips might be milliseconds rather
than seconds or minutes.
Or it could be a brownout type of situation.
So in this case, your application is sized right at
your constant power.
But if the power drops off, once again, the ultracapacitor
will discharge to fill in that sag in available power.
So this is a type of case where you would have a power
requirement, and the incoming power for some reason
crackles, or dips, or goes through some sort of
disruption, and you can't afford to have that happen, so
you have an ultracapacitor in line with that power.
And when it sees all of a sudden the power has gone
away, it discharges so it fills those gaps.

So this type of technology can then be applied to a wide
variety of applications.
It can be applied to consumer electronics where you have
something like a digital camera, that when you take the
picture, you have a surge of power because it needs to
write all those bits all of a sudden.
Normally, it's just sitting there
keeping the display opened.
You have applications like wind power, solar power, and
even standard hydroelectric power plants or coal fired
power plants where you need to temporarily store energy in
order to be able to deliver it in a smooth way.
They would like to be on the opposite end of that last
slide where they get paid more for cleaner energy delivery.
So if they have factories that have critical processes in
their path, they want to make sure that they deliver the
cleanest power that the can without any dips or jumps.
So they would like to put ultracapacitors right outside
their door so that as they're feeding power out, they can
take care of those ups and downs themselves.
They charge more for cleaner power.
So for them, it's an economic incentive.
If we look at the global market, it's growing.
The technology has been around for a long time, but people
have had a hard time implementing it in a way that
is cost effective and will let these applications take good
advantage of it.
This year, you'll see it basically this kind of a
breakdown between consumer, industrial, and automotive
transportation type applications.
And we'll describe those a little better.
But it's going to be growing significantly.
And you'll see that was forecasted to grow the most is
the automotive or transportation side with the
advent of electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles.
When I first got involved 10 years ago with
ultracapacitors, we were talking about electric
vehicles and how ultracapacitors help them.
As we went through the next five years and the hybrid
started becoming more of what the automotive world wanted to
go to, we got more excited because hybrids use
ultracapacitors even better than electric vehicles do.
So as the market develops, the only thing holding it back is,
is it too costly to implement?

On the consumer electronic side, we talked about some of
these types of applications and where the ultracapacitors
is really pumping power into the application, either to on
a small level balance the power requirements, do the
power balancing.
But one of the major things to take note of here is that the
ultracapacitor, because it can be cycled so many times, it
has the ability to be recharged almost at will.
So if you have a burst power application that might be
sending a transmit to a GSM satellite for--
the Air Force has emergency radios that send a one-second
burst to their satellite every minute.
So if you have a long one-second burst, but then
it's quiet for 59 seconds, if you put a battery in next to
it, you can get the ultracapacitor to provide that
burst, and then the battery just kind of trickle charges
the ultracapacitor back up to capacity.
Over the next 59 seconds, it's ready to go, and
boom, off you go.
The battery never gets degraded because it's having
those high power requirements pressed on it.
So it's an application that's an example of how the
ultracapacitor put in parallel with the batteries, even the
little C cell, D cell type batteries, if there is a burst
requirement--
we've demonstrated on cell phones, and toys, and other
applications that you can extend the life of the battery
by up to four times solely on the basis of the fact that the
battery is not seeing those high power requirements and
having to charge and discharge.
Most all battery tech chemistry are going to
degrade over time.
And that's why you have limited cycle life on a
battery is because it's constantly degrading that
chemical reaction that's building the energy that
you're trying to discharge in the form of power.
So on a smaller scale, there's many applications in the
consumer electronics world.
We talked about industrial power management.
Once again, this is a case where the power companies see
a big advantage.
I've spent several trips, gone out into the fields of Utah
where you have power grids that are stretching for miles.
And there's nothing in between the two relay sites for either
power or telecommunication sites.
And you get out there, and there's this shed that's
probably 20 by 20 by 10 feet tall.
And it's full of lead acid batteries.
And those batteries are sitting there so that if there
is a drop on the power grid that could potentially start
cascading, they need to hold it up as long as they can,
normally, so that they can start a generator to start
feeding power back into the grid.
So if this stack of lead acid batteries, hundreds of lead
acid batteries, start leaking, or they have bad batteries in
the middle of the stack, or whatever, the power companies
and the telecommunications companies spend ungodly
amounts of money with people traveling around in trucks
doing nothing but maintaining those stacks of batteries.
And they're expensive.
And they're ecologically hazardous having all
that lead out there.
And they leak all the time.
In the case of the power grid, what we did was we set up a
fuel cell next to an ultracapacitor,
put it on the grid.

Right off of the power lines, we just trickle charged the
ultracapacitors so that it always
maintained its full charge.
And the total box of ultracapacitors is about size
of this table here.
So we had a box of ultracapacitors being
constantly held at full charge just by trickle charging off
the power line, put a fuel cell next to it.
Now the fuel cell, because a fuel cell generates power
based on generally pressure of hydrogen or whatever you're
using in the fuel cell, if the power goes away off the grid,
all of a sudden there's no power available.
So the batteries or the ultracapacitor would have to
be there to start the fuel cell.
Well, the ultracapacitor is great for delivering power for
a couple of minutes long enough to get the fuel cell
pressurized to the point where it's delivering sufficient
power that it can run.
Now you have a set here of both a fuel cell and an
ultracapacitor set that needs basically no maintenance
activity, because the ultracapacitors will charge,
and discharge, and be fine for 100 years and hundreds of
thousands of cycles.
And the fuel cell is pretty much inert until you fired up
and start pressurizing the hydrogen.
So of course, after you do that, you'd have to go out and
refill your hydrogen tank.
But that's about it.

And the other major application is transportation.
We kind of focused on the automotive side of
transportation here, but the automotive world includes
things like forklifts, and many other
trucks, buses, et cetera.
The ability of the ultracapacitor to provide the
burst power and do fast charging is really critical to
making an HEV, a hybrid electric vehicle, successful.

In order to sell these things, you have to have some
performance.
So you got to sell it to people that know when they
step on the gas, it's going to jump and go forward.
But you also want to capture the braking energy.
In a hybrid electric vehicle or an electric vehicle, your
wheels are driven by electric motors.
So when you go to slow down an electric vehicle, you don't
apply brake pads and lose all that energy.
You reverse the motor, and you pull energy out of the wheel.
So what you're doing there is you're charging the
ultracapacitor.
So breaking a hybrid electric vehicle is charging the
ultracapacitor.
Now, if you've gotten down to the point where you actually
stopped, which is always a good idea, now it's time to
reaccelerate.
Well, you have a fully charged ultracapacitor sitting there
with nothing to do but discharge and give you as much
power as you need.
So we went up to Los Angeles and put a 300-volt
ultracapacitor system on the top of a city
bus up in Los Angeles.
Now this was a diesel hybrid.
So it had a small diesel engine, and electric motors in
the wheels, and batteries.
We put ultracapacitors up on the roof of this thing, about
300 cells that were size of Australian beer cans.
And just doing that, by feeding the power through the
ultracapacitors, we were able to demonstrate that--
well, you've all seen a city bus come up to a bus stop and
then try to leave. The first thing you get is this big
black smoke cloud as the bus tries to get
away from the curb.
Well, because the ultracapacitor was there, it
just discharged the ultracapacitor.
So the diesel engine didn't even have to rev up.
It just stayed in idle.
The ultracapacitor provided enough power to push the bus
away from the curb and get it up to about 20 miles an hour.
At that point, the diesel engine just kind of came in on
a smooth accelerate and accelerated, and then took
over driving the bus down to the next bus stop where the
ultracapacitor would be recharged.
And the whole cycle would repeat.
Well, the efficiency of capturing that breaking energy
in a bus and feeding it back into the drive train lowered
the emissions of that diesel hybrid, which already had a
small diesel, by 60%.
So it had a dramatic effect on how much fuel and how much
emissions were going through that diesel engine.
Now there's another part of the automotive world that
seldom gets a whole lot of attention from the
ultracapacitor guys, but it's very important.
Most of the major automotive companies are now looking at
putting in high voltage subsystems.
Typically, it's 42 volts.
And that's because in your car, you have a 12-volt
battery, or maybe a 16 depending on your car, but you
have a 12-volt battery, and every time you roll up your
power window, or do your power locks, or turn on your radio,
or do this, that, or the other thing, you are dragging down
on that battery system.
So the battery has got to deal with all of those extraneous
power requirements going forward.
The ultracapacitor put in series with a small battery,
42-volt battery, allows you to reduce the current runs, you
deal with thinner cable, and you can power all the safety
things independent of the car battery.
So it becomes not only a more efficient use of power and
energy inside the vehicle, it also adds to the safety.
Because if you have an accident, and you disable the
battery, you have backup power normally located close to
where the thing is going to happen.
Your window motor has the ultracapacitor right there.
We saw a demonstration at Ford one time where recently
somebody had driven their car into a lake for some reason.
And they couldn't get their power window down because as
soon as the front of the car got in the water, started
shortening up their electrical system, their power window
wouldn't go down.
But the ultracapacitor sitting there right on the window
motor, it doesn't matter.
It immediately took the window down.

In all the time I spent with the automotive companies,
there's probably 100 examples of how node power can provide
a big advantage to an automobile.

Here's an example of how the Honda electric vehicle uses an
ultracapacitor.
The motor power that you see there,
that's the motor running.
So those are the wheel motors in some.
So your ultracapacitor, when you accelerate the vehicle,
because here's power going up, and here's the acceleration
curve, so as your speed is going up, the ultracapacitor
is discharging to support the fuel cell as it
comes up to its load.
And so the two combined allow you to do a quick
acceleration.
And then you drive along, cruising along, until you
start to brake.
And at that point, you start shutting down your fuel cell.
Your speed starts dropping dramatically.
But your ultracapacitor starts charging.
So now your ultracapacitor is charging down in this area
because it got depleted during this cycle.
It was back down to zero power.
Now it's going to recharge and be back and ready to
accelerate again.

So I've talked about all these different applications.
And why aren't these things out there
and everything already?
They should be.
I mean Radio Shack showed us how to do it 45 years ago.
So the problem is that the issue becomes how much is the
cost of the delivered power from a
specific energy density?
Now as I said early on, you could always deliver power but
from what energy source?
So if you need to have really high peaks of power, and you
can't live without it, you need to size your battery
large enough so that it will supply that
power peak on demand.
If you don't, you can't get that power out of the battery.
Now the other issues of the battery cycle life and
everything, and how much that hurts the battery are
immaterial at this point.
What we need to do is worry about is the cost of putting
the capacitor in there enough to offset the cost of the
larger battery that you had to put in there, combined with
the weight that you're carrying, the efficiencies of
miles per gallon, all the other economic reasons why you
would want to worry about size, weight, and density.
Also, the efficiency of the charge and discharge cycle.
How often do you have to change your car battery?
Maybe not that frequently anymore.
They've improved that technology.
But an ultracapacitor will go for hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of cycles without being changed.
So there's a lot of charge/discharge efficiency
that's going to benefit the application.
Now, it may not be so obvious in a car, but how often do you
change the batteries in your pagers or other applications
that are using burst power?
I've alluded earlier to the temperature range,
ultracapacitors, because of their starved electrolytes,
will operate down in the minus 55 level even.
The military, both in Russia and in the United States, has
for several years been testing ultracapacitors as emergency
start cold weather starting.
So you just throw it into the battery box of a diesel truck.
And when it's too cold for the battery to start the truck,
you just flip over and start it with the ultracapacitor,
and off you go.
By the time the truck warms up, the battery warms up,
everything's fine.
Then you recharge the ultracapacitor.
Total cycle life and then safety.
Safety, as you're pulling energy out of the battery,
you're stressing it chemically, so it warms up.
You get very hot batteries when you have a lot of power
requirements on them.
The ultracapacitor will allow you to lower the overall
system temperature simply because the ultracapacitor
generates no heat when it's discharging.

So APCT, the company that we're working with, what we
have tried to do and what's been developed by this team
based in Kiev is a new implementation of the
ultracapacitor technology, where we can achieve a higher
power density, the ability to deliver those peak powers,
based on modifying the current collector, that if you recall
on that earlier diagram.
We modify the current collector in a way that
reduces the resistance of the current going through, so it
makes it a much more efficient power delivery device.
The same team has also devised a nanoporous electrode, which
is a carbon electrode, that they can precisely determine
the size of the pores in there, make them fit the ions
that are being pushed in and out, so they can optimize the
amount of energy that that electrode can store.
So the two together means that you can deliver more power
than competing ultracapacitor technologies.
And you can store more energy than competing ultracapacitor
technologies.
And then again, the low internal resistance helps with
keeping the overheating issue under control.
If you look at ultracapacitors that are being delivered
around the world, there's two types of ultracapacitors.
Some are normally called supercapacitors.
And those are delivered by companies like Panasonic.
A lot of the Japanese consumer electronics companies have
small supercapacitors.
Now they are very inefficient in the terms
of their power density.
They're very cheap to make and very easy to make.
But they have no power or energy density
capability to speak of.
So they do work in certain applications.
You'll find one in everybody's VCR.
I remember not too long ago, if you had a brownout in your
house, you had to go around and reset all your clocks,
reset your VCR, reset everything that didn't have a
battery backup in it.
And now they put these little cheap
supercapacitors into a VCR.
So if you have a glitch in power, it will ride through
that power glitch for as many as 10 or 20 seconds.
But beyond that, it's depleted.
You'll have to fix the clock when the power comes back.
But you can ride through changing out the battery.
I'm always looking for ultracapacitors.
I found when I installed an automatic thermostat in my
house that had a couple of batteries in it, when it gave
me the low battery signal, I pulled the batteries out.
I was going to lose all my programming.
But there was an ultracapacitor in there.
And if it weren't for the fact that I would habitually
dropped the batteries and not find the new ones fast enough,
I could have changed the batteries without losing the
programming.
The APCT technology, if you look at this, the
ultracapacitor mass is on the left hand, and the power
delivered to a load in kilowatts is
on the bottom axis.
The APCT versus the current high power ultracapacitors
like those made by Maxwell Technologies, the APCT
prototypes deliver at the high end here at about one quarter
of the mass.
And in the case of ultracapacitors, one quarter
of the mass is one quarter the size, is one quarter of the
cost in very general sense.
The further down you get, the more packaging
becomes part of the issue.
So you lose some of that advantage the
further down you get.
But on the high end where you're looking at automotive
and industrial in particular, that significant difference
translates into a much better cost structure than is
currently available.
Right now, to get a one kilowatt ultracapacitor on the
current marketplace, the price is a little over $300 and
coming down slowly.
When I was at Maxwell Technologies six, seven years
ago, I was selling a one kilowatt device for $2,500,
size of an Australian beer can.
Now it's gotten down to the $300 range.
But you need about 100 of them to make a hybrid electric
vehicle work.
So 100 times $300 isn't very conducive to
hybrid electric vehicles.
If you come down and look at this yellow one, that's the
APCT cost to manufacture the same one kilowatt.
So you can see that we really broken under the $50 per one
kilowatt module range and have the opportunity
to keep going down.
So what we're doing is making a major jump in the cost
structure of the technology that we hope will allow all
these applications that are taking advantage of new energy
alternatives to become more successful and more efficient.

APCT, the company that's doing it, is a US registered company
formed by a group of Ukrainian scientists in Kiev. Over 50
man years of experience, I've worked with parts of this team
over the last 10 years.
The seed investment came from TECHINVEST, a VC firm based in
Kiev. And we're working on how to get this to market in the
most effective ways.
And we're looking at joining and doing strategic
partnerships with some US and Asian-based companies that are
into manufacturing batteries and ultracapacitors, and also
developing our own manufacturing capabilities,
both in the Ukraine and in the US.

And some of the testing that's been done, Doctor Andy Burke
out at UC Davis is one of the gurus that I've known for 20
years that does all of the analysis.
And he's, in fact, getting ready to do a presentation in
Florida next month that will show APCT's technology
compared against the other competitors.
So that's our presentation.
We're happy to take any questions.
These are the two locations, one in Virginia and the main
office in Ukraine.
I'm out of San Diego.
And I'm working with this team to see how we can develop the
US marketplace and get it rolling.
I'll be happy to take any questions.
And the team from APCT is here to answer technical questions.
And we're open to any of your ideas or suggestions.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Say I'm trying to get rid of a lead acid
battery, 10 amp-hour, 14 volts.
What would be the size and cost of something like that if
I just went to all capacitor?
JIM NICKERSON: Well, the first problem you're going to run
into is getting rid of it, because it's got lead in it.
AUDIENCE: Without recycling.
JIM NICKERSON: Yeah.
But you have to recycle it.

I don't know that I can size the ultracapacitor.
10 amps--
AUDIENCE: 10 amp-hours.
JIM NICKERSON: 10 amp-hours.
I can't answer that question off the top of my head, but
why don't you see me afterwards, and we can sit
down with a pencil and pencil it out.
AUDIENCE: Is there a some standard size that I could get
a handle on?
I don't have a feel for sizing and cost.
JIM NICKERSON: One of the larger cells made by almost
all of the manufacturers right now is roughly a 2,500-farad
ultracapacitor.
A 2,500-farad ultracapacitor is roughly one kilowatt of
delivered power.
And it can be delivered over different lengths of time.
Let me see if I can go back to that.

So on this slide, what you see-- and all that acid
battery generally falls within that battery complex.
The power delivery is basically watts, and the
energy is watt-hours.
So what we have to do is calculate the watt-hours and
the delivery capability by going through the map from
your amps to create the size that you would need.

Yeah?

AUDIENCE: I know with batteries, you have to worry
about thermal runaway and things like that.
What are some of the concerns about ultracapacitors, and how
do they stand up to pressure tests and things like that?
JIM NICKERSON: Ultracapacitors have been tested pretty
dramatically.
Because you're really only moving ions back and forth,
you don't have any chemical reaction going on.
So you really don't have any internally generated heat in
an ultracapacitor.
Now historically, the ultracapacitors being made by
Maxwell and others have used acetonitrile as being the
electrolyte in that cell.
And acetonitrile includes, in other words-- slips my mind,
what's the poison?
A poisonous substance.
So you don't want to get it on you.
We always made the argument that the way you would--

I can't remember the word now--
the way you would clean up a spill would
be with carbon cloth.
And we have the carbon cloth built into the ultracapacitor.
But because it's a starved cell, the only physical
reaction to being crushed would be the potential to leak
electrolyte.
Because there's no chemical reaction going on, there's no
danger of explosion or anything like that, the
failure mechanism for most ultracapacitors that have been
tested by a variety of companies is they'll develop a
pin hole leak, and they'll get salt forming on the
outside of the cell.
Honda, when I was working with Maxwell, we had a joint
development agreement with Honda.
The Honda HEV, and the Honda electric vehicle, and the
Toyota Prius are the major production vehicles that have
ultracapacitors at this point.
And in testing, they were driving nails through the
ultracapacitor cells just to see what would happen.
So it's proved to be a very safe technology in automotive
applications and other smaller applications.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So how well do they hold the charge in sort of
using the battery replacements?
JIM NICKERSON: We did some tests with Disney because they
wanted to put ultracapacitors into their parking lot trams
and determined that a good ultracapacitor will hold its
charge above 90% for 72 hours or longer.
They will leak.
I mean those ions will slowly start
coming out of the electrode.
However, you can charge it back up almost
instantaneously.
So one of the requirements, or in most applications, you
often see a recharging capability fairly close.
I don't know if APCT has demonstrated any charge
holding testing recently.
But generally, you can hold it above 90% charge for at least
72 hours but fully discharged, depending on the manufacturer,
several weeks.
So it's not an energy storage device for long term storage.

AUDIENCE: What's the limiting factor for energy density?
And what is the projectory for energy density over time for
let's say the last 10 years going forward?
JIM NICKERSON: The limiting factor on energy density is
how much of that ion can you put into the electrode.

If you picture the electrode as being like a sponge, the
electrolyte is flowing through here, and as you charge it,
those ions are working their way into the sponge because
they need as much surface area as possible.
So the energy density is the total surface area that's
available when you charge it.
So as many ions as you can put up against the electrode, if
you imagine a flat plate electrode, you've got a flat
surface in two-dimensions, you put as many ions on
there as you can.
With a ultracapacitor electrode, a three-dimensional
surface, you cram as many of them in there as you can.
You have the problem that if they have to go in too far, if
they tunnel in way in there, then they're going to be
encountering and creating resistance in getting out when
you discharge it.
So you have to balance the total surface of the
electrode, which is your energy density factor by your
desire to deliver power, which is the resistance to getting
them out of that.
So that's one of the things that you do with
ultracapacitors as you balance what you want in terms of
energy density against what you want to deliver as power.
And they've made some pretty good strides
over the last 10 years.
APCT has demonstrated a dramatic new ability to
deliver power by having this nanoporous electrode and this
etched, specialized current collector, that when combined
together, both reduce the internal resistance and
provide more surface area.
So you're dramatically increasing your energy density
and lowering your resistance at the same time.
AUDIENCE: Can you quantify that?
It just seems like the ultracapacitors
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
just short of where you want to be in terms of replacing
batteries [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
JIM NICKERSON: The one thing that an ultracapacitor will
never do is replace a battery.
AUDIENCE: Well, largely replace the battery.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE] significantly smaller battery and a larger
ultracapacitor.
JIM NICKERSON: Right.
That becomes a matter of cost. From a technology standpoint,
it's been demonstrated over and over again, you can reduce
the volume of battery by a factor of four in some
applications that have high peak power requirements, but
it costs you ten times the cost of the batteries.
So you could be replacing batteries for 50 years before
you pay back the ultracapacitor.
So it ends up being a cost issue.
The technology has been there.
It's just a matter of can you build it and have it reliably
deliver the power you need in that application?
And also, can you make it small enough physically to fit
that application?
So all the applications--
and I come from a marketing background.
So I look at the ultra capacitors as being only a
tool to solve an application problem.
So if the application can be solved with the
ultracapacitor, if it took an ultracapacitor as big as this
table to make a two-way pager work well and make it so you
never had to change the alkaline battery in a two-way
pager, OK, that's the starting point.
Now let's get this ultracapacitor down in size by
improving the energy density and the power delivery
capability.
Let's get that ultracapacitor down in size and cost to make
it realistically go into that two-way pager.
So much of that has been done except for the
size and cost aspect.
You're right.
It has another order of magnitude to go.
And that's what APCT is trying to demonstrate now with its
prototypes is that they have made that order of magnitude
jump, almost an order of magnitude jump, for [? x ?]
the power in a given volume.
So the APC ultracapacitor is positioned to be one that
could enable many of these applications, not because it's
more powerful, has higher energy density, but because it
can do the same power delivery in one quarter of the volume.
It takes one quarter of the material.
It takes roughly one quarter of the cost. So the real
application requirement has been met with something that's
one quarter the size and roughly one quarter of the
cost. So it enables then that application to go forward.

Hybrid electric vehicles, as I mentioned, need about 300
volts worth of cells.
Ultracapacitors--
it actually never made it into this presentation--
but an ultracapacitor is like a battery.
And it's pretty much limited it 2.7 volts per cell or so.
So you need to put about 100 in a car to make it work.
So right now, the hybrid electric vehicle wants that
battery pack to be about one cubic foot, and it needs to
cost less than $300.
Right now, it's about three cubic feet, and
it costs about $20,000.
So we're trying to get there.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So what is your first
standard commercial product?
What size?
How many farads is the cap, and how many have you shipped?
JIM NICKERSON: Sergey, I'm going to have to let you
answer that.

SERGEY LOBOYKO: What Jim was talking about [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
technology, which is now got seed investment to establish--
yes, thank you very much.

I can speak?
So quick answer is the following, when is the
[? stage ?] for building the manufacturing plant?
But what the [? stage ?] is now with this company, that it
has developed a key protector proprietary technology and
prototypes which were tested and performed those results.
Now we're talking about what is the right business strategy
to be because there are different issues.
There are very small, medium-size, large
ultracapacitors.
And they have different niches and different markets.
And each of these niches need different models of
ultracapacitors.
Therefore your question, it was not easy to answer from
let's say from the [? Tribune ?] because it's
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] to calculate.
What is the real need to be satisfied?
That is us.
AUDIENCE: So when are you anticipating beginning volume
production?
SERGEY LOBOYKO: Volume production, the first, let's
say manufacturing capacity that we are now building, it
will be about 30,000 units per year.
It will be ready until the end of next spring, next year.
Why am asking?
Are you a potential client?
AUDIENCE: I can ask the next question is how many dollars
per watt, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] of the watt leaves cost?
You would have to compete with batteries where you always
have the option, at least in stationary applications, of
just buying more batteries to meet your power budget.
SERGEY LOBOYKO: I would answer the following.
If you have seen the already existing market for
ultracapacitors, which are very expensive, it's already
about $300 million.
And it's growing annually not less than 30% during plus
three years.
What we possess, this technology, which is at least
10 times cheaper if you compare cost, what will be the
market price we're now thinking about?
But it's cheaper and possesses performance advantage compared
to already existing market capacitors.
Therefore, it can compete for existing markets as well it
can create the new demand from other potential clients, which
would buy it if it will be not so expensive.
It is not.
Is it correct, Jim--
JIM NICKERSON: Yes.
SERGEY LOBOYKO: --My statement?
JIM NICKERSON: Well, as he asked that question, this was
the one slide that we actually took out of this presentation
because we didn't think anybody
would ask that question.

So this is a slide that shows the current ultracapacitors
and the APCT.
The left hand axis is dollars per watt-hour.
And the bottom axis is dollars per kilowatt.
So you got energy on the y and power on the x.
So the dollars per watt-hour are for the APCT technology on
the order of $20 per watt-hour, where they're in
the order of $10 per kilowatt from a power standpoint,
versus competing technologies, if just for as an example, go
to the way right hand side, the most energy efficient
standard ultracapacitor on the market were in the same energy
level, watt dollars per watt-hour.
There's much higher cost per watt-hour.
So from the APCT standpoint, this is the
money slide for us.
It's not the technology, but that's the money slide.

VLADIMIR BILODID: My name is Vladimir Bilodid.
I'm partner with TECHINVEST, which has
invested into this project.
I would put it in a very simple way.
We are not competing with any kind of batteries at all.
What batteries do, they provide power.
What APowerCap does, provide not energy.
APCT provides power.
So it works together with battery.
It does not compete with battery, therefore, batteries
are better for storing joules.
APCT is great in providing watts.
And they are not competing with each other.
For your car, you have a big battery like 10 pounds, or
even 20 pounds, because this battery needs to provide you
with power.
It has a lot more energy than your car requires.
But you need to have such big battery because you need to
have a large surface to make sure your 300 [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
which are used by your starter are in place.
If you have power capacitor which is twice or even four
times less in size than the battery, and the battery which
is four times less in size, they will fit together.
They will work like a power supply unit for the car.
So we are not competing with batteries.
We are talking different languages for the same reason.
LYDIA MAZZIE: You guys, we're out of time.
JIM NICKERSON: Yeah, we appreciate your attention.
And we'll be here and answer any questions you have. Thanks
for coming.