Sakti3 Letter

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I have been an information technologist for over 30 years. My day job is as a Ruby on Rails developer at Tribune Publishing.  I learned of your company through my alumni subscription to Technology Review, and I'm wondering how I might contribute to the commercialization of technologies like yours that have great potential to contribute to sustainable development paths.

I am most interested in creating a bridge between emerging technologies and collaborative enterprise.  Without getting into details, I'm also interested in developing community currencies in a way that supports community based economic development.  We know that even without a revolution in the basic cell technology that solid state li-ion batteries represent, there will be growing markets in all of the markets related to all of the operational and lifecycle phases of batteries and the products that use them.  Ultimately, there will need to be armies of workers and technicians with skills and experience, and we can better create both the market and skills if they are established as open commonwealths with low barriers to entry.

If we can collaborate with Sakti3 to build a collaborative learning lab to produce batteries based on your technology, we can accomplish severals goals at once:

  • Develop and prove out the commercial processes at prototype scales.
  • Provide a community laboratory for skills development.
  • Provide sample quantities to developing related technologies.
  • Enable university collaboration through internships and research partnerships in this and related technologies.
  • Provide a track between vocational education and retraining programs that could enable gfited individuals who come from at-risk populations the opportunity to earn STEM degrees.

I've tried to assess from the outside just what stage of development you are at.  It seems you are probably working out the problems of scaling production right now, but that your approach puts you a lot closer to that goal than most new technologies would be at this stage.  I'm encouraged by the ideas pitched on your website that indicate that from the start you were thinking about how the commercial processing could be done with well understood production technologies from other product lines.  I'm guessing there are a lot of under-employed people who have worked on similar production lines all over the Midwest, and places like Chicago where I live and Detriot even closer to you are prime examples.

Is it really just a matter of repurposing machines from similar processes that deposit layers of material onto a film substrate?  If so, what is the rough scale of one of these plants in terms of dollars, manhours to get it running and floor space?  I'm quite certain the investment money could be there for any well-developed business plan.

I have no illusion that we would be far from the top of the list in terms of qualified investors, but I hope that the intangibles create some interest.  What I do have to offer is a deep and intuitive understanding of technology that leads me right to the heart of a problem.  I can communicate with mathematicians and engineers because I can speak their language, but I am even more interested in developing collective capacities through evolution of social processes and architectures.  If you can let a community of us borrow your technology with full credit and acknowlegement, we would promise to give back in full measure as our capacity grows.  You would not only receive full cash payment based on any profitable operations in our collaborative network, but there would also be immeasurable gratitude embodied in  long-term working relationships and friendships.  Our network might give us a distributed team of researchers to make the next leap forward in ten or twenty years.  One or two of them might be your most valuable employees in the future.

Collaboratively yours,

 

 

Gerry Gleason

p.s. This letter is available at this web address: Sakti3 Letter, and the background essay I wrote is also on my website Anticipating Lightweight and Cheap Batteries

Perusing the copy of Technology Review that just came in the mail, there is a one pager about the CEO of a battery company.  I really liked her approach and it started me thinking again about my interests in ecological economic development.  Look around today and you see a complete infrustructure for servicing the needs of all sorts of vehicles that use internal combustion engines.  Engineers know it is a simple matter of power density that has kept batteries from matching fossil fuels for cars and even airplanes.  The promise of solid state battery technology to deliver batteries light enough to work and cheap enough to be economic is upon us.

My experience is in information systems, but my real interest is in proving the value of social networks and peer production in the creation of wealth.  We are too good at creating exclusionary wealth and need to find a way to manage true scarcities with markets, while opening up the available abundance in shared wealth.  I'm going to guess from the outside that the value Sakti3 has is in the form of proprietary software that expresses the condensed experience of decades of recent history in the battery industy.  They present the opportunity for very simple and successful business plans

  1. Get some capital and labor together.
  2. Use Sakti3 expertise and software to develop a manufacturing capacity for solid state battery products.
  3. Profit.

The traditional way to do step 1 is to find some investors with spare money to invest, but that is only one alternative.  With much smaller amounts of capital and a pool of eager and able labor, the same thing can be done with decentralized capital.  Already there are electric and hybrid cars being sold that need to be serviced.  The average garage mechanic will be able to replace the components he recognizes when they break, but the batteries are a new technology.  In ten or twenty years we can anticipate growing demand not only for new electric cars, but also in replacement batteries and conversions.  This predicts a growing market for batteries and growing connected markets to sell and service the products that contain them.  These markets will be growing while other markets contract.

It seems that this technology is at a prototype phase, but by addressing the development tasks needed to go from prototype to economic manufacture, many of the risks that make lead times unpredictable are addressed.  Only experience will tell if this is so.  I know I could find a team as interested as I am in trying this out.  Let's say we build a prototype plant that is designed to produce prototype quantities of the new batteries, and at the same time serve as a learning and training environment for building new plants.  We would augment the knowledge based systems from Sakti3 with collaboratively build knowledge bases.  We will build the financial systems for collaborative enterprise to keep track of all the shared wealth we are building and sharing.

Once we are producing prototype batteries, we can start to supply products and services that use these batteries.  One group might build a battery upgrade and plug-in system for one or more Hybrid models, another could do conversions.  Smaller markets for smaller batteries would also work well for our decentrallized approach.  For instance,  there could also be a market for lightweights like pedal/electric cars and cycles.  Performance cycles (replacements for traditional motorcycles) and marine power would start in the middle-size for batteries.

As the market and demand develop, our collaboratively build network of labor and capital might even out-compete the traditional methods of capital formation.  Either way, we can anticipate a healthy ecosystem if the path to efficient manufature of light/cheap energy cells is realized.