COMMERCIAL CONSIDERATIONS

“The knowhow and technology in use today are very good batteries are being made to high standards and with efficient use of materials. There are not many "bad" lead-acid batteries being made nowadays."

There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of this assessment. Yet, despite appearing to be so close to the pinnacle of success, the technology has perhaps become altogether too uniform, leaving consumers insufficiently motivated to distinguish one particular brand from all the others. Naturally, battery purchasers will then buy at the best price and availability, at the exclusion of all other factors.

Without style, quality or performance to differentiate between the different branded "black boxes", market forces will continue to exert a downward pressure on selling prices.

While obviously a simplification, because there will always be some differentiation, it is hard to deny that overall, this has been the general trend for at least the last 20 years.

Although this could be described as characteristic of a mature market, as such it implies a problem that is extremely difficult to overcome. Far more productive in the long term surely would be to regard the market as technologically limited?

This limitation exists only in the sense of lead-acid technology having been so expertly refined over many decades, that only small incremental refinements continue to be made. However, the path of groundbreaking technological progress is rarely linear.

A distinguishing feature of successful technologies is how often they seem to emerge unexpectedly, their originators outsiders who see a way of adapting a technology from one area of expertise into a transforming technology in another field.

The best example of this took place on March 7, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of the hearing-impaired, received his patent for the telephone, arguably the most successful patent of all time. Bell, having a unique understanding of the nature of the sound of the human voice, was able to convert it into its equivalent alternating electric current, transmit it and convert it back into sound at the distant end of the wires.

His contemporary, Thomas Alva Edison, the world's most prolific inventor, the world's leading expert on electricity and the telegraph, had simply failed to appreciate the advantage of transmitting the human voice, instead of morse code, purely because he had not seen any commercial possibilities.

The sheer number of similar examples stretching right across all fields of human endeavour seems to confirm a need for interaction between dissimilar disciplines in order to make progress.

This implies the logjam can be broken by relying less on the continued use of specialized knowhow, and more on the skilful management of beneficial interactions between seemingly unrelated fields of expertise.

Obviously ease of assessment, viability, incubation period, cost of technology, marketing advantages, business strategy and capital requirements are among the important factors that need to be carefully considered.

While it is not unusual for electronic and computer assessments to be concluded within only a few hours, lead-acid fundamentals might require several years of experimentation, a discouraging prospect.

The ion selective screen can be demonstrated at work in a procedure lasting just four hours; it can be evaluated on the basis of electrical measurements within a week; it can be shown to be effective in practical fleet operation as saving water within 10 weeks and in controlling antimony in under a year. None of these activities are complicated and none carry a significant cost.

These examples are not suggested as substitutes for traditional comprehensive testing but rather as a form of shorthand evaluation that can help to quickly establish the potential of this emerging technology in terms of corporate business strategy.

Granted, this is uncharted territory. Who is to say the ideas will lead anywhere? The temptation to force argumentation over the scientific method can be strong. On the other hand the ideas could well be what this industry needs. The decisions that have to be made are not necessarily difficult because testing merely constitutes an option to continue, it is not a commitment.

This is as close to a completely risk free way of exploring opportunity as can be arranged - a modest investment in testing that can easily ratchet up to a remarkable marketing advantage.

The next step is to define the objective. Putting the battery equivalent of style, quality and performance at the disposal of the customers. There has to be a benefit to the manufacturer, the distributor, the customer and the technology originator. As such it can only be made to work through exclusivity.

This aspect is crucial. If the new technology is made freely available over every counter, its commercial advantage will be short lived due to a resumption in price cutting. Patents are essential in this context, although they should not be seen as barriers but rather as a means of building up this line of business through negotiated licensing. The ion selective screen patents are focused on the way it works, rather than on the ingredients that make it work, making them among the strongest of their kind.

The ion selective screen technology possesses a remarkable and unequaled versatility which can be put to work according to any one of an array of specific commercial requirements. For example, reducing water consumption, extending battery life, increasing battery capacity, maximizing battery output current, improving energy density, reducing evolution of harmful gases and so on.

Reduced wear and tear of the positive plates can mean thinner plates, with numerous advantages. Sealed lead-acid could come much closer to matching the performance of flooded types. Battery powered road vehicles would benefit from longer life batteries and increased energy density.

In this kind of situation mutual cooperation is likely to provide the most reliable roadmap to profitability.

The technology started off as a discovery in the field of water treatment for industrial batteries. From there it has grown into a range of compounds, some soluble and ideal for existing fleets of motive power batteries, others sufficiently insoluble to last the lifetime of the full spectrum of lead-acid batteries.

Most of the new compounds have a different composition to the original one and the details are kept confidential to avoid any problems that can arise in some areas of commercial rough and tumble. The patents are equally effective for all the different compositions.

Today's battery technology was built around lead at $500 per tonne. It has to be made better to deal with lead that has gone up in just four years to between $2500 and $3500 per tonne. That makes it twice as important to act now.

F & H (Proprietary) Ltd., email info@battery-plus.net