ViZn Energy rehires most of furloughed workforce
ViZn Energy, a Columbia Falls-based industrial-size battery manufacturer, has rehired much of the approximately 60-employee workforce it had furloughed on March 16.
“We’re hiring back about 75 percent of the workforce in Montana,” new Chief Executive Officer John Lowell said during an interview.
A successful round of fundraising done after the exit of the former CEO is what gave them the resources to restructure and bring so many people back, Lowell said. The company also expects to hire five or six positions they were not able to fill because the people doing those jobs pursued other opportunities after the furlough, he said. The restructuring is also coming with a strategic shift: Lowell said they are switching gears to prepare the product to hit the market sooner than originally planned.
He said the company is working on constructing tests for customers and partners to show how far along its technology has developed.
ViZn Energy had put resources into installing test products during the period when its workforce largely was furloughed, and would continue to do that in the coming months. He hopes to be ready for a large-scale commercial deployment in six to eight months.
They also originally planned to provide a lot of the post-installation technical support in-house, but since the restructuring the company has decided to use partners for that part of the process.
Lowell insisted that despite recent hardships, ViZn Energy has weathered the storm and emerged to fair skies.
“The mood is quite upbeat,” Lowell said. “The problems that we’ve had for the last six months or so have been financial in nature and not technical. The technology is good; we need to do more extensive testing to demonstrate to our customers and partners that our technology is ready.”
In a leadership shakeup, Lowell, the former chief operating officer, is taking over an additional role as CEO. Former CEO Stephen Bonner abruptly left the company after a short tenure.
The company was founded in 2009 as Zinc Air, but leadership changes have roiled the company in the last year. In January, the company announced that Bonner, who became chairman of its board of directors on Jan. 1, had also assumed the role of president and interim CEO following the resignation of Ron Van Dell.
Bonner was a director as well as president and CEO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America for over 13 years. He was an adviser to four private-equity firms, as well as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Harvard Business School, according to the company’s website at the time.
Approximately 11 months after the much-lauded recruitment, a federal tax lien worth $1million was filed against the company. Three months later, the company’s workforce was furloughed.
The company, which is located on U.S. 2 just south of Columbia Falls, was named one of 15 Montana companies to watch in 2017 by the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. The Columbia Falls facility serves as the primary research and development arm of the company, and it has sales representatives located throughout the United States and Europe.
The company has claimed over the years that its battery technology, which is designed to be used with solar- or wind-powered systems as an energy-storage solution, was superior to other technologies because it was environmentally friendly.
A single battery is the size of a shipping container. It consists of two large tanks of liquid electrolytes, pumps and a “battery stack” of patented zinc membranes that store the energy. The technology has several advantages over other industrial-sizes units such as lead acid, lithium ion or molten sodium batteries, former ViZn President and CEO Craig Wilkins said during an open house in 2016.
Reporter Peregrine Frissell can be reached at 758-4438 or pfrissell@dailyinterlake.com.