Clean energy for all at a fraction of the cost of today’s carbon based production. This is the holy grail of today, at least when it comes to energy. But take your mind one step further, what kind of world could we create if we had access to almost unlimited energy everywhere?
The greatest problems of mankind that we are facing right now would be seriously helped if we could solve this puzzle. If we had free access to energy we could for instance create fresh water out of sea water giving large parts of mankind access to fresh water, make the entire transportation sector free of emissions thus solving great parts of greenhouse problems, deplete world hunger with better production methods.
These are only some of the environmental issues, the economic sector would boost and the world would almost certainly face decades of continuous growth, comparing to the situation after the second world war. That period was in fact ended by shortage of energy in the oil crisis of the seventies.
So, why all the fuss about free, almost unlimited energy for all? In January 2011 the Italian Inventor Andrea Rossi presented a new invention called the E-cat. This invention he claims produces safe energy by getting water to boil with the help of Cold Fusion. In other words he has found a way to combine Nickel and Hydrogen into Copper and getting great amounts of energy in the process.
Historically the field of Cold Fusion has been a no mans land of science since late 80´s when the two scientists Fleischman-Pons called out to the world with their experimental setup. What they claimed was that they could achieve Fusion at low temperatures. Fusion is the process where two elements combine into a third. This is what happens in the Sun, where two hydrogen atoms combine into helium. In the 80′s large parts of the scientific community tried to reproduce the experiments but failed. Even Fleischman-Pons could not repeat the results consistently. This led to a great disregard of the entire field and it was left to the backyard of science.
What happened in January was that Andrea Rossi called a Press conference showing his setup of the machine he has named E-cat, short for Energy Catalysator. The normal scientific procedure is that you first write a scientific report that is peer reviewed, i.e another scientist reads and criticizes the work. Another fundamental of science is that the experiments shall be reproduced in laboratories around the world.
As the field of Cold Fusion has been contaminated with bad history the scientific world sees with disrespect of all people entering the world of Cold Fusion. In this case the inventor Rossi heeded to the field of capitalism and entrepreneurship instead to the field of science. His aim is to build a factory first and then show his invention to the world.
At the current he is building a factory in Greece and it will produce 1MW of energy from mid/end of October. Is it true? Is he a Fake? For every day that we get closer to October and more news gets public the probability increases. Lately we have comments from official sources as NASA looking into the field of Cold Fusion, or LENR as it is called (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions). The Inventor has three Patents submitted for his device. One is already aproved, and two are still Pending. This is why we are in a standstill. Is it the biggest invention ever made, or is it a hoax?
The site http://www.e-catinfo.com tries to summarize all the facts about this extremely interesting field into a single figure, E-Cat Probability Index, i.e a number from 0-100% indicating how probable it is that it is true
Clean, almost unlimited energy for all, it´s and interesting thought. Is it for real?
Fredrik Jonasson is the founder of E-catinfo.com and interested in possibilities new technology can create on the world we live in.
Fredrik has an Master of Science in Materials Engineering and is CEO of JonaCom AB. Currently he works with Enterprise Architecture and ITIL adaptations.