I’ve had a few e-mails from readers wondering what the heck is going on at ZENN Motor Co., which apparently didn’t — contrary to its own expectations — receive its first commercial EESU demonstration unit from EEStor before the end of 2009.  The company has yet to put out a press release on this (as a publicly traded company, some say it should), so here’s the response I got directly from the company’s media-relations department:

The last remaining contractual milestone between ZMC and EEStor is the third party verification of delivery of a full production quality EESU that meets certain specifications outlined in the Technology Agreement between the companies. Achievement of this milestone will be announced by ZENN Motor Company via news release to all stakeholders.

Any interim sharing of information or technology between ZMC and EEStor is confidential in nature and will not be publicly disclosed. Any announcements related to EEStor’s technology that fall outside of the contractual milestone described above are strictly within EEStor’s purview to release to the public. ZMC will only comment on EEStor’s progress once the information is made available in the public domain by EEStor.

ZMC remains focused on the development of its ZENNergy drivetrain solutions in anticipation of the successful commercialization of EEStor’s technology. ZMC continues to work with EEStor on a regular basis.

So, that’s where things stand… As Chaucer wrote more than 600 years ago, “Patience is a high virtue.” Or not. I doubt you’ll hear ZENN making any more predictions of when it will receive its first EESU. Still, given the expectations it has built up over the last two years and given that ZENN’s future rests almost entirely on the success of EEStor, the company should probably be more communicative with shareholders. At the same, shareholders need to realize that with those updates ZENN isn’t making hard promises, but merely shedding light on a schedule that — as we’ve certainly learned — is difficult to nail down.

UPDATE: StephenB makes a good point in COMMENTS by parsing ZENN’s statement. It may have received an EESU, but hasn’t announced anything yet until “third party verification of delivery of a full production quality EESU that meets certain specifications.” So, technically, ZENN may — or may not — be on track. We just don’t know.

Bloom Energy, a semi-stealthy investment of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has been making more noise lately about its fuel-cell technology. The company, in a recent BusinessWeek article, claims its system — about the size of a refrigerator and capable of supplying both heat and power to a home — will come down so much in cost over the next three to five years that it will hit grid parity. It’s not like the technology that Bloom’s product is based on is new. Solid-oxide fuel cells have been around for years and several startups have combined heat and power products based on the design. But Bloom, obviously, has figured out a way of making it reliable and cheap enough to deploy widely — or so we’re led to believe. The system would run on natural gas or a selection of renewable feedstocks, such as ethanol, offering a way for natural gas companies to indirectly become power utilities. I compare it to the battle between telephone and cable companies, which have infrastructures based on different technologies but eventually began competing in each other’s market for the same services — phone, cable, Internet. Utilities — gas or electric — will soon just be called energy utilities, capable of providing a package of electrons and BTUs.

Like many secretive Kleiner Perkins investments — EEStor, for example — let’s hope the hype and promise leads to something truly disruptive. Speaking of EEStor, tick, tick, tick… the end of the year fast approaches.

My Clean Break column today is a bit of an update on ZENN Motor, the potential of EEStor’s EESU, and an interesting comment about EEStor from Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, who before becoming an entrepreneur had plans to enroll in engineering graduate studies and focus on ultracapacitors for vehicles. I also mention some interesting work on ultracapacitor materials being done at Queen’s University in Kingston, and talk about a new ultracapacitor bus operating in Shanghai that will be demonstrated Wednesday in Washington, D.C. (for another more detailed article on the ultracap bus check out this Technology Review article).

I have a story in today’s Toronto Star about the leak nearly three weeks ago of a 38-minute telephone interview with EEStor founder and CEO Dick Weir. As others in the blogosphere have speculated, the audio recording that appeared on Yahoo Video (apologies, but in the story I incorrectly say it was on YouTube) was in fact a recording of a conference call between Dick Weir, representatives of ZENN, and representatives of Paradigm Capital and at least one of their institutional investor clients. Paradigm, which was co-leading a recent equity offering for ZENN, facilitated the call.

The president of Paradigm confirmed what happened but said it’s not known how the recording made it onto the Internet. ZENN, meanwhile, is arguing that the information within the interview is not material or was disclosed previously, so while the leak is embarrassing it’s not breaking any rules. Of course, I’m sure many of you out there who have heard the recording or read the script would beg to differ. It will be interesting to see how this controversy unfolds, and whether financial regulators in Canada decide to look into it further.

(NOTE: The video on Yahoo has been disabled, not surprisingly. But someone over at TheEEStory.com has kindly supplied a transcript.)

Mr. Weir probably had no clue the person interviewing him would post this on the Internet, but it appeared just a few hours ago. Weir talks about the history of EEStor, how he hooked up with Ian Clifford at ZENN Motors, the relationship with Lockheed, and the status of EEStor’s ultracapacitor development. Weir says there’s really nothing standing in the way now from commercial production, and that pre-production of EESU units will begin in the fourth quarter. This is a lengthy, very detailed phone interview, and I don’t believe Weir would be talking this way if he wasn’t confident in the road ahead. It sounds like, from the interview, that somebody is trying to profile EEStor and Weir — perhaps, maybe, for a documentary that’s being made?

(NOTE: I’ve spoken with Dick Weir several times by telephone. This is his voice in the interview, 100 per cent, for those who wonder if it’s some kind of impersonation hoax.)

A few nuggets:

* Says Kleiner Perkin’s owns “20-something per cent” of the company.

* Weir says he and his co-founders still own controlling interest in the company.

* On Lockheed: “I’m really in deep with Lockheed Martin.” He said Lockheed has no investment, but relationship goes way back.

* On EEStor’s value: “If we make an EESU… God only knows what we’ll be valued then.”

* He has two patents on grid-load levelling. “You can put 45 per cent more electricity on the grid and do nothing more than put our batteries on there…. that electricity could supply the electricity to the electric vehicle market as it emerges… we make wind and solar real… you can make a wind farm operate like a coal-fired plant and it’s really cost-effective.”

* On storage for PCs and handhelds. “We can take a battery for a cellphone and give you three to five times more energy storage that would never degrade on you and you can charge in seconds.”

* Electric vehicles: “It’s going to take time to emerge, but I think with ZENN Motors it’s going to be very interesting to see them grow dramatically to capture that market.”

* On portable tools: “I’m already in knee-deep with the people in the portable tool business. They’re waiting for me to emerge and they’ll come on strong.”

* On relationship with ZENN and the EESU: “They buy it for a certain amount and they put it in their car. Right now our contract says $100 per kilowatt-hour, excluding electronics, and it’s extremely attractive. You take a lithium-ion battery right now it’s $350 to $1,200 dollars… nobody is going to compete with us, certainly no lithium-ion.”

* How quick to market for EESU electric car? “Need is always a wonderful thing, and the need is very high for our technology…. there’s nothing corrosive, harmful or explosive in our technology… there’s nothing, there’s no chemistry part of our product. It’s all solid state… I think also ZENN is going to happen very, very quickly… people will want that electric car. They’ll be able to test it, don’t get me wrong, but they’ll be able to pass those tests quickly because we’ve got the UL.”

* On EESU status: “I’m already out there putting EESUs together and I’m still in June. I’m ahead of schedule.” Says ZENN will get pre-production prototypes by the end of this year. “Once I do that, all hell is going to break loose for ZENN as well as EEStor.”

* Ending note: “We’ve done our homework, and you’ll see the results when we get into 2010… you’ll see a very effective and constant ramp-up to our production capabilities.”

I can guarantee one thing: this audio/video will spread like wildfire across the Internet over the next few days.