Then Kennedy throws out this zinger: The company has a $100 million order for its batteries from a Canadian utility, and another $100 million order from Duke Energy.

Wahhhh? I figured he mispoke, that he was exaggerating, and as an advisor confused some facts. After the speech, I sat down with him and asked him about that comment. He seemed a bit taken aback by my interest, but didn’t backtrack. I asked about the Canadian utility, and he confirmed but said he couldn’t name the utility. I asked about Duke, and he confirmed. He stuck to the $100-million figure for each order.

Now, there’s not much known about Premium Power, beyond VantagePoint’s investment. In 2006 the company was awarded a $500,000 grant through a trust overseen by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. The company said at the time it planned to use the money to “scale their stacks into a large-scale Zinc-Flow 9000 system suitable for integration with renewable-energy sources such as wind and PV for load-leveling.”

Now that’s intriguing. Premium Power’s Web site doesn’t mention the Zinc-Flow 9000, and strangely it has removed all past and present press releases from the site. Yet here we have Kennedy, an advisor to Premium Power’s top investor and certainly a man armed with a wealth of knowledge, talking about $200 million worth of energy-storage orders.

Hmmmm… this could  be interesting.

One More Note: Kennedy also said Premium Power’s battery costs “less than” $200 per kilowatt-hour. That compares favorably to sodium-sulfur batteries from companies like Japan’s NGK, which cost about $250 per kilowatt-hour, and vanadium flow batteries from companies like Vancouver-based VRB Power, which cost about $400 per kilowatt-hour. If Premium’s zinc-bromide battery is truly half the price of the VRB battery, then the economics of such storage become much more compelling.