QED began with something Wayne Berry saw while living in Africa: what daily outages and brownouts do to ordinary life. Homework that can’t be finished after dark. Meals that can’t be cooked. Businesses that close early. The question that stayed with him was simple. Could a battery be safe enough, and affordable enough, to sit in an ordinary home and keep the lights on when the grid goes down?

That question set the three rules QED still works to. The battery must be safe. It must be affordable. And it must be made from abundant materials, not scarce ones.

In June 2016 Wayne built the first cell himself, in his garage. It ran for a handful of cycles, then failed. That was enough to show the idea had something in it.

During the pandemic he went back to it, and in 2021 QED Battery Corp. was incorporated. A government research grant funded the first serious work with Lambton College, which built a cell that cycled four times. Further grants brought in GreenCentre Canada, which took a half-cell past a thousand cycles. Each partner carried the chemistry as far as its lab could, then handed it on.

Then the National Research Council of Canada made the introduction that mattered: to Ontario Tech University and Professor Sheldon Williamson. With Ontario Tech as its research partner, QED built its own research team and has moved the chemistry forward ever since.

Rechargeable alkaline zinc has three well-known failure mechanisms. They are why the industry set the chemistry aside for decades. At QED, all three are now controlled together. Today the cells are prismatic, and a pilot facility is next.

The original question still holds.