After a presentation on December 21, the board of the Ulster County Industrial Development Agency (UCIDA) unanimously approved a preliminary inducement resolution for Zinc8’s energy-solutions project. The next step will be the scheduling of a public hearing.
An energy storage system based on zinc batteries is the main technology offered by the Canadian company, it has submitted applications to base its commercial manufacturing in a 150,000-square-foot warehouse space at iPark 87, the former IBM site in the town of Ulster.
Wooed to open operations in the United States by the promise of substantial tax credits made available by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and senator Chuck Schumer’s charm offensive, the company had initially announced plans to build its first plant in Ulster County. Zinc8 will receive a scalable $35 tax incentive for each battery produced, with incentives to continue at that level until 2029, phasing down and out over a multiple years thereafter.
The company says it is anxious to get on with the with the business of building the business, a process expected to take nine months after finalization of the site lease.
Ron MacDonald, the CEO of Zinc8, spoke to the IDA board prior to the vote. A former Canadian federal legislator, he says “pro-cess” instead of the drawly American “pra-cess,” “aboat instead of about,” and “rezource instead of resource.”
“I grew up in a small coal mining town in Cape Breton,” said MacDonald by way of introduction. “Everybody was poor because the Dominion steel and coal company came in and they extracted a resource. What my grandmother would say is the only thing they left behind was black lung and widows.”
MacDonald explained that by contrast Zinc8 intends to be good corporate citizens as well as part of the community by developing a properly trained workforce that gets paid good wages and has a profit-sharing plan.
“We’re at that point in the development of our company,” said MacDonald, “we’ve got 59 employees. We are growing. and over the next three years our plan is to go up to about 298 employees, with a five-year goal of over 500.”
Zinc 8 projects annual sales of $80 million, with 95 percent of its customers expected from North America.
MacDonald pitches the company’s product as one way to resolve issues with renewable energy. When the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, battery storage can pick up the slack by storing energy to be used when needed. Contrasting it with lithium-based batteries, MacDonald touted the safety of zinc-based storage.
“There’s nothing in it that’s exotic. There’s nothing in it that can burn. There’s nothing in it that off-gases .… We don’t really manufacture, what we do is that we take components that are custom-made for us in the US or in the NAFTA of the old NAFTA area because then they qualify [for the incentives]. Everything we’ve got we can source in North America, so we don’t have to worry about Russia. We have to worry about China and all the nasty things that they’re doing with weaponizing supply chains, and there’s nothing environmentally that would cause a problem for us. Zinc is plentiful, it’s non-toxic, it’s in a KOH solution, which is basically potash, and that is, uh, that is kind of what makes it all work.”
Power from the grid or renewable sources is used to generate zinc particles. Oxygen is released to the atmosphere as a by-product. The zinc particles are stored in potassium hydroxide (KOH) electrolyte until it is required. When power is needed, the zinc particles are recombined with oxygen to generate electricity. The zinc oxide byproduct is returned to storage for later regeneration.
The benign nature of the electrolyte is a selling point. Zinc8 asserts its batteries can be shipped dry. Massive amounts of chemicals to add to the batteries don’t need to be stored.
“Zinc8 is a unique technology that’s been developed over about twelve years,” said MacDonald, who became CEO three years ago when there were just 14 employees. “And we have 23 patents. There’s seven in the line that we’ve applied for and there’s another nine were probably going to win over the next twelve months.
“The reason I say that is to let you know that what we do is unique. We’re a very novel company. and so the technology is novel. It’s not like we take other inventions we’ll put together to make a different-looking automobile. Our vehicle is completely different from anything else on the market.”
Assuming feedback from the public hearing allows the project to go forward and the current asbestos removal at the site is completed, Zinc8 can get to the business of running a business. Lithium and cobalt battery competition, take note.
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