EEStor's New Patent

There's so much noise — Slashdot, at The EEStory, gm-volt.com, and EEStor Ultracapacitors — that it's hard to understand the major issues being bruited in the new U.S. Patent (7466536B1) filed recently by EEStor. Perhaps the most interesting part of this comes in this The EEStory discussion thread about the patent. This post in particular interests me (all lower-case typing is a direct quote):

i found it interesting that the patent describes taking the alumina and PET materials down to -150 degrees C! i'm no expert, but i doubt seriously that's a common practice. that's very cold.

maybe that's the magic fairy dust everyone has missed -- the use of extremely cold temperatures to modify the property of the materials in order to make this seeming violation of physics work.

i've been following eestor for years now and i don't think they've done it, but i do find the mention of ultra cold temperatures used in manufacturing very, very, very interesting. is the low temperature something that would have been done in weir's previous career in hard drives?

as others have said, r. weir is either one of the boldest liars out there or he's an extremely shrewd inventor.

We still, of course, don't even have a demonstration unit released, and there's plenty of good reason to be skeptical. But if they're liars, they're certainly keeping their mouths awfully closed, an awfully long time. It's entirely possible that there were design problems they assumed they could skate past that have proven more problematic than they first thought. It may not ever work, but that is not the same thing as a scam.