EnZinc Team/Intro
EnZinc was founded in 2011 by a team of engineers and business people with deep experience in the high-tech battery, automotive, and aerospace industries. Their goal is to develop high-performance energy storage technology that matched the ethos of the renewable energy movement. Michael Burz, an innovator who has brought high-tech products to life and won over $2B in new business, leads a team of world-class engineers from the CTO, Dr. Sam Mohanta, who wrote the book on nickel-zinc batteries, to Chief Engineer Meinrad Machler, who has led teams in both zinc and advanced lithium batteries. EnZinc management is advised by highly experienced Senior Advisors including EnZinc’s patent counsel Tim Stanley, former Chief Patent Counsel for Sandia National Labs, Simon Inman, EnZinc corporate Attorney, and Stephen Ambler, EnZinc’s CFO.
Customer Need – Current Limitations
The 21stcentury demands more energy storage. Today the world has only two choices: low energy/low cost lead-acid or high energy/ high-cost lithium ion. The former has toxicity issues; the latter has resource and safety issues. Li-ion safety issues involve random thermal runaway events similar to the Samsung Galaxy S7 fires and the Boeing 787 fire that cost each company billions. EnZinc offers a safer, high-performance alternative.
EnZinc Solution and Why
EnZinc has been working with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) for the past five years on a high-performance battery based on zinc. Edison recognized zinc as an excellent electrode material, due to its natural reactivity. Zinc is also the fourth most mined metal on the planet and is totally recyclable, making it very affordable. Our anode is the only three-dimensional (3D) zinc micro-sponge that prevents battery-killing dendrite formation. The 3D zinc anode will be coupled with different cathodes for different applications. EnZinc will start with nickel, as it’s plentiful, its characteristics are known (for quick entry into the market), and the Ni-3D Zn battery has many immediate applications. The manufacturing process for EnZinc’s Ni-3D Zn battery is almost identical to a lead-acid battery production line, allowing safe rapid adoption in existing battery facilities, without major capital investment.
Technology Defensibility
The technology is covered by four patents. The EnZinc/NRL team validated the technology with a highly competitive award of $565k from the DoE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The technology is described in a peer-reviewed article in the journal Science.
(http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/415,http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/new-battery-could-save-your-cellphone-going-smoke)
The Market Opportunity
EnZinc has the exclusive license from the NRL for all wheeled vehicles and micro-grids/distributed grids up to 60MW. EnZinc plans to pursue the $35B dollar lead-acid battery market first, followed by the $40B Li-ion market. The EnZinc Ni-3D Zn battery has a 2X to 3X advantage in energy per weight and cycle life over lead acid with a comparable cost. The applications will be electric bicycles/scooters in Asia/India, UPS, particularly for the military, and start-stop micro hybrid cars. An additional market is micro-grid storage from residential to industrial. The EnZinc battery is equivalent in energy to weight for some types of Li-based batteries but is much safer and cheaper.
The Market Landscape
The global battery market is dominated by two entrenched but vunerable battery chemistries: lead-acid, and Li-ion. Lead-acid batteries have increasing difficulty meeting the demands of high-energy storage, in addition to using toxic lead that must be recycled. High-energy Li-ion batteries use environmentally and ethically challenged materials and are prone to spontaneous thermal runaway. Current zinc battery suppliers use complex, non-mobile solutions like flow batteries or incorporate dendrite-suppressing additives as a patch to extend their cycle life.
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