Well, to be entirely honest… not yet. It may take several years, probably 10 or 20 at least, before we can say adieu to today’s most used sources of energy, but there is a new kid on the block new in the energy field.
Some of you may have heard, as of lately, about the resurgence of the so called ‘cold-fusion’ and also ‘LENR’ (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) experiments, in other words all those studies aimed to develop clean and non-radioactive energies that are somehow generated simply by exercising some sort of action on the atomic structure of certain materials (i.e. palladium, deuterium, nickel, etc.). You may remember the famous story of Pons and Fleischmann, many years ago, claiming they had obtained something in that direction, but then their theory crumbled miserably when other scientist tried to reproduce the effect in their labs.
20 years have passed since then, but in January 2011 an obscure (somebody think mad) italian inventor/engineer named Andrea Rossi started to claim that he had found a way to produce excess heat via some sort of cold fusion-like process. He called his invention the ‘ECAT’, or ‘energy catalyzer’.
The issue was that Rossi’s claims were not supported by any evidence. Two years passed, and many started to accuse him to be building a giant hoax, when finally, a couple of days ago, on May 20th, a group of serious academics (all with reputations to lose), published a detailed and thorough paper titled “Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device” where they did show that Rossi’s invention is not a hoax: his device produces clearly an incredibly large amount of heat from a still unknown/unexplained sort of non-radioactive nuclear reaction.
The paper is available for download from here and was authored by Giuseppe Levi of Bologna University, Italy; Evelyn Foschi, Bologna, Italy; Torbjörn Hartman, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér of Uppsala University, Sweden; and Hanno Essén, of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Here below is an image of the Rossi’s ECAT device at work, while generating hundreds of degrees of heat at virtually NO COST.
Yes, you’ve heard it right, the cost of the energy generated by Rossi’s device is virtually zero.
The ‘fuel’ used to run the ‘reactor’ is apparently a small rod of nickel loaded with some proprietary additive and it is estimated that with one rod the reactor can run for 6 months, no stop, after which you must substitute the rod (estimated cost of replacement: a few dollars).
This reactor/device is already for sale for heat production (only available to industrial customers, 1 MW plants, not available for retail clients) and can be bought from here. Disclaimer: we have no affiliation whatsoever with this company, but this is such a breakthrough in the energy field and Rossi’s company is a start-up, so we wanted to spread the word about it.
Now, why did we say that this device will make us wave goodbye to all previous known forms of energy, including fossil fuels, nuclear and solar?
Well, because in the long term the ECAT energy reactor will be used to generate not only heat, but also electricity (for example it could be used to propel steam turbines or steam engines) and its ability to produce virtually FREE and CLEAN energy, at a COST NEAR TO ZERO, will inevitably lead to phasing out all the other, more expensive, risky and polluting forms of energy.
Even clean energies like solar panels or wind towers all of a sudden will start to look like ugly, primitive, inefficient (and pricey) energy sources, if compared with the ECAT reactor.
It’s hard to say how this invention will impact the energy market in the medium term. Probably not much will happen because this product (albeit available for purchase for corporate clients) is still very much at the beta level and we surely don’t foresee oil prices collapsing tomorrow morning. In any case the rationale behind this post on SOH was not so much to give investment advice but rather to share the news about this revolutionary energy source that may change forever the world in the next years.
There are a myriad of discussions on the subject and the LENR/cold fusion topic is so wide that it cannot be debated in a short post like this, so if you want to dig deeper into this and track all the news and the most recent updates about cold fusion and LENR, you may want to check out E-Cat world, the main web portal on the subject.
Free energy for all.
