M2E captures $8M with kinetic energy

Kinetic energy created enough power to pull in $8 million for Boise, Idaho-based M2E Power, which is developing a motion to energy generator.

OVP Venture Partners led the Series A round for M2E, which just came out of stealth mode with this funding. Also participating in the round were @Ventures, Highway 12 Ventures and existing investors.

"At the core of the technology, M2E is really a change in the architecture of magnetics and coils, so it's a physics level solution. So it really not only impacts mobile electronics but all generators that use induction," Regan Rowe, licensing and business development manager of M2E, told the Cleantech Group.

The company is currently working on a D-cell battery sized solution for the military, capturing the kinetic energy of normal everyday motion to generate enough electricity to power mobile devices and lowering the 10 to 30 pounds of batteries that soldiers often carry.

Soldiers would be able to just pop in an M2E D-cell, and use it like any other battery, without modification to a lot of their equipment.

Check out the little M2E units here >>

That's a hot market for a number of companies, including Eatontown, N.J.'s Millennium Cell (Nasdaq: MCEL), which is working on a hydrogen fuel cell solution for the military (see Licensed to win).

The units from M2E could be combat ready by the end of 2008 or early 2009, with consumer models following about a year later. But even bigger applications are in the works.

"For instance, with hydro-electric dams, they rotate out those generators every five years," said Rowe. "You could rotate one out when it goes through a rotation cycle, you could change out the magnet and coil system that's in that generator for M2E and you would get increases in your efficiency."

Rowe said it wouldn't take a huge amount of capital to build that improvement into the generator. The company plans to build a small prototype this year to demonstrate the technology's usefulness in wind, wave power and hydro applications.

The cash raised in the Series A will primarily go toward the prototypes needed in the company's development phase.

"If you were to retrofit M2E into an existing wind generator, they're about 40 percent efficient, so if you can increase the efficiency, suddenly you've got some of your renewable energy solutions that are now competitive with fossil fuels," said Rowe.

M2E's technology started off as U.S. Department of Energy-funded research at the Idaho National Labs in Idaho Falls, about a five hour drive from Boise.

The company has a global exclusive license for the system, and the inventor Eric Yarger continues to work with M2E at its headquarters in Boise.

The system uses the Faraday Principle, where energy is produced by the motion of a magnet through a wire coil, such as in those flashlights that you shake to light up.

The problem with those flashlights is that although you can generate electricity, you can't generate a lot of it. M2E says its system takes the Faraday Principle to the next level.

"The materials are the same, it's a change in the magnets' orientations to each other, and that's what creates a shift in the lines of flux," said Rowe.

She said this change creates a null point in the center of the magnetic field. "And what that does is it changes how much you have to move to create energy, how much the magnet has to move."

A regular magnet and coil system in a D-cell size package would produce in the microwatt range if someone were walking around with it, according to Rowe. But she said the M2E system can produce hundreds of milliwatts, a 300 percent to 700 percent increase in the amount of energy that you can generate.

The next phase of military testing for M2E will start in the second quarter of 2008, when it will go through a ruggedizing process.

"They'll shoot it, they'll drop it from planes, they'll run over it with tanks," said Rowe.

The consumer version won't have to handle the same amount of shock and humidity as the military model, but Rowe said it would definitely be a rugged little generator once you see it in your cell phone.

That application, which would be even smaller than a D-cell, is about 24 to 36 months out, although Rowe said a backup charger from M2E could hit the market first.

The company plans to build out the technology to a pre-commercial phase and then license it out to manufacturers. "You could easily build this on a battery production line," said Rowe.

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