"Profile: At 85, Green Giant Stan Ovshinsky Sees His Ideas Bearing Fruit" Green Car Advisor

Profile: At 85, Green Giant Stan Ovshinsky Sees His Ideas Bearing Fruit

By Dale Buss, Contributor

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan -- Like the environmentally friendly "hydrogen energy loop" that he designed more than a half-century ago, Stanford R. Ovshinsky's career has come full circle.

He was among the first in the world to outline how solar and hydrogen power might someday renewably and cleanly provide most of modern man's transportation and other energy needs -- his "loop" -- and now it looks as if things might come to that.

At 85, Ovshinsky finally is enjoying a turnaround in fortunes of the company he founded in 1960, Energy Conversion Devices Inc.

The inventor's science underlies fabulous technologies such as flat-screen TVs, photovoltaic roof shingles, lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries for cell phones and automobiles, and a form of computer memory that Intel is investigating as a possible successor to Flash.

But Ovshinsky always ran ECD more as a research institute than as a capitalistic enterprise and was unable to make the company commercially successful over the long haul. ECD's board and long-suffering investors finally ran out of patience and ushered Ovshinsky out last summer.

Also booted was CEO Robert Stempel, the former General Motors chief executive who had teamed with Ovshinsky 13 years ago and had brought ECD to the brink of commercial viability.

Since the shakeup, the long-moribund stock of this small technology company has risen to prices of around $77 a share, about double its trading average last fall. ECD also just reported a first-quarter profit, its first in years.

Under new CEO Mark Morelli, a former United Technologies Corp. executive, the company has filed for a new stock offering. Uni-Solar, an ECD subsidiary, is producing the thin-film solar panels that Ovshinsky pioneered and is expanding manufacturing in Michigan and in new facilities in Ohio and Mexico.

And Cobasys, the battery company founded by Ovshinsky and now co-owned by ECD and Chevron, is producing all the nickel-metal hydride batteries for GM's growing hybrid fleet.

Cobasys also is developing advanced lithium-ion hybrid-car batteries with A123 Systems, one of the two battery-systems companies competing to win the contract to supply the Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric car expected to go into production in late 2010.

One Good Turn

There also are rumors circulating that GM wants to acquire ECD, which is ironic, as Ovshinsky developed the batteries used in GM's ill-fated electric-car venture in the late 1990s. GM's EV-1, the first modern electric car, was canceled unceremoniously after California regulators watered down the state's demand for zero-emissions cars. GM's move, often seen as an affront to the green-car movement, was memorialized in the 2007 movie Who Killed the Electric Car?

GM and other American automakers "were late in adapting" to the necessity for electric propulsion of vehicles "despite my anguished pleas," Ovshinsky said in a recent interview with Green Car Advisor.

"The Japanese took in nickel-metal hydrides well before the American companies," he said, without a hint of the vengeance that could be justifiable, given that Ovshinsky has been advocating and developing electric and hydrogen-powered automobiles for decades.

Now the American automakers "have to make it up," he said. "It's terrible, but it's an opportunity to show inventiveness and tap the can-do, American-work-ethic battle cry."

While ECD essentially has shelved its decades of efforts to develop a completely hydrogen-powered vehicle, Ovshinsky still believes that hydrogen fuel is destined to play an important role in automotive propulsion in the years ahead.

"But it will be on a different kind of basis than we were trying to develop," he said. Hydrogen "doesn't need to run the engine."

Instead, he sees hydrogen as the fuel either for electron-producing fuel cells or for hydrogen-burning internal combustion engines that serve as onboard generators to produce electricity that drives a vehicle's electric motor. "All you'll have to do is take out the gas tank and put in a solid-hydrogen system and keep everything else normal -- and it works."

Ovshinsky, a slight figure crowned by a shock of curly silver hair, often displays a slight impatience that comes with being more brilliant than just about anyone you've ever met.

He's had his share of knocks -- his first wife and collaborator, Iris Ovshinsky, drowned two years ago; he's been enfeebled by recent health problems, and his ouster from ECD has got to rankle.

But he says he holds no grudges and, indeed, displays a magnanimous attitude toward Morelli and the rest of ECD's new managers, few of whom ever sat through the Ovshinsky-led annual meetings of ECD that more closely resembled graduate-level physics lectures than corporate briefings.

"I don't live in the past, so whatever they do [at ECD] now, I wish them well," he said, seated in his new office in the Institute for Amorphous Studies, a tiny research outfit Ovshinsky founded many years ago. Its small campus is adjacent to his home here.

Stempel had the company re-create Ovshinsky's old office in the new setting, right down to the same huge Periodic Table of Elements that graced Ovshinsky's wall at ECD for decades. Ovshinsky's younger brother, Herb, a former long-time ECD employee, is chief engineer and keeps Institute operations running.

Ovshinsky and Stempel recently were honored together by the Engineering Society of Detroit for their trailblazing work at ECD and GM, respectively. But neither has offered a valedictory. Bowing out of his life's work isn't even thinkable for Ovshinsky, who has remarried to a former ECD colleague and who still gives speeches all over the world on his science and technology.

Epochal Brilliance

From the vantage point of more than a half-century after his initial pioneering work -- and across the long decades of ECD's failure to launch commercially -- it is easy to lose sight of Ovshinsky's brilliance. But Nobel Prize laureates have seriously compared him, intellectually, with Thomas Edison.

An Akron, Ohio, native, self-taught machinist, union representative and inveterate tinkerer, Ovshinsky took his high-school education to Detroit in the '40s. He was determined to sell the revolutionary pre-robotic machine tools he had designed and began to create an entire new scientific discipline around what are known as "amorphous materials."

Essentially, what Ovshinsky did is apply his insights from studying the structure of the brain to flout conventional wisdom in material sciences, which was centered on the capabilities of orderly crystalline structures such as silicon transistors.

Figuring the structure that works for neurons also might serve inanimate purposes, he demonstrated the effectiveness of molecular disorder for a variety of applications including storing information and converting solar energy to electricity, mostly performed by slapping thin, glassy films of wildly combined alloys onto a variety of media.

By the late '60s, a blitz of national media attention put him and ECD on the international science and technology map, to the great chagrin of Fortune 500 research laboratories. Application by application, he massaged his basic insights about the nature of materials into what eventually would total about 300 patents and the broad new technologies that ECD and its partners -- eventually -- would end up commercializing.

In the intervening years, the Nobel Committee awarded a couple of physicists for their work in the science that Ovshinsky started.

Yet the father of the study of disordered materials hasn't been similarly recognized, perhaps because of the prize committee's institutional biases against scientists with no formal training.

Life's Work

Meanwhile, the "Ovshinsky effect" as well as the word "ovonics" -- combining "Ovshinsky" and "electronics" -- became so recognized as staples of science that they made it into the dictionary.

Although Ovshinsky may have been able to match wits with Edison, his business acumen would have been dismissed quickly by Edison's buddy, industrialist Henry Ford.

In the 1970s and '80s, Ovshinsky sold licenses to huge industrial supplicants, including Matsushita, Canon and other powers in Japan, where -- much like American quality-management expert W. Edwards Deming -- Ovshinsky became a hero even as he remained a prophet largely without honor in his own country.

Nowadays, however, an undaunted Ovshinsky comes to work nearly daily at the Institute, continuing to pursue at least a couple of goals. First, he still is working on technology to promote the broader adoption of hydrogen power in various applications in order to reduce emissions of Earth-warming greenhouse gases.

"I'm fulfilling my original reason for setting up ECD, but not trying to make another ECD out of it," he said. "The subject is too big for that. Also, we only have about 20 years before climate change becomes inevitable."

Perhaps even closer to his heart is an information technology that he calls the "cognitive computer," which he says would closely mimic the methods of the human brain. "I'm laying the groundwork for that as soon as I can," Ovshinsky said.

"Iris and I didn't set up the company to do anything but use our own talents to solve serious societal problems," said Ovshinsky, who sees his technologies as his gift to the planet.

"We were both very conscious of the need to build new industries. And I've done it."

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Photos courtesy of Ovshinsky Innovation.