With New Information the E-Cat Picture Clarifies

I wrote just a few days ago about how unusual and interesting Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat story has been. Because of information that has been released over the last few days things have become even more interesting. Here are some of the pieces of the puzzle that have been recently been put into place.

The 1 MW Plant that Rossi has been talking about for so long really DOES exist. Mats Lewan of NyTeknik went to see it, and took pictures and video. It has been built in Bologna (I had always been under the impression it was being built in Florida) and according to Lewan, is being shipped to the United States. The original plan had been for it to be sent to Greece for the first demo, but since Rossi severed ties with Defkalion GT, it will make its debut somewhere in the US.

This plant will be made up of 52 E-Cats. For a long time Rossi had been talking about using around 300 4kW E-Cats, but apparently after consulting with his colleagues in Sweden he decided to move to a larger model which is capable of delivering up to 27 kW. Apart from any other advantage of the new model, it must help to have fewer modules to monitor and maintain.

Mats Lewan carried out some testing on one of the E-Cat modules, and it appeared that it was able to operate efficiently without input power for considerable period of time. Unfortunately, because of time constraints, Lewan only observed an E-Cat running without power for 35 minutes. It would have been more convincing had that been a couple of hours.

Lewan mentions in his detailed report of his test that in order to run in a stable condition this E-Cat model needs to be “charged” with electrical power every 10 minutes, and then can run free from external power for another 30 minutes. According to Rossi and Focardi, E-Cats can run for much longer without external power and produce higher levels of power output in that state, but they are less easy to control when doing so. The current lower level of operations are maintained for safety reasons.

Andrea Rossi has also revealed that in addition to the demonstration of this 1 MW power plant, he will also unveil at the launch a smaller E-Cat-based device which is designed for the consumer market which is capable of supplying a source of domestic heat. When I asked him about this on his web site he replied,

“Dear Frank Acland:
I am referring to the small units for households too. We are very advanced. Yesterday we made a test with one of them, making hot water, we got a fantastic result. Very satisfied. What we did is make steam, exchange heat with a heating water circuit, condense the steam, recirculate the water. It worked perfectly, stable, with a power of 9 kW, also in self sustained mode. We will test publicly this system together with the 1 MW. Lot of work to do, but we are going through: the toy for the mass market is very close.”

On further questioning, Rossi explained that the power/self-sustain function of this home-based E-Cat would be automated.

Rossi is obviously very pleased with this heater which, if it is reasonably priced and works as advertised, would be a tremendous boon to homeowners everywhere who face ever-increasing costs to heat their homes.

Quite surprisingly, Rossi also admitted on his web site that he is currently under considerable financial pressure and sounds to be working under a good deal of stress. In an unusually long post (for him) he revealed:

“Yes, everything is going on as scheduled, so far. You are right, there are many difficulties, we did not have any financing and are working exclusively with our money, the technology and the process we are using is new, all the different LENR made before are totally different and we have no experience from competitors that can be helpful, honestly: even the ones who got some watt have technologies totally different from ours, as everybody will see when we will disclose the theory, and no experience at all has been made from anybody on reactors producing real amounts of energy, I mean in the range of kWh/h. Now there is a race of guys who try to say that our work derives from theirs, but unfortunately there is no way that there is around something useful, so we have to open our path through an unexplored jungle of difficulties, and the expenses become everyday higher, for unforeseen problems. But, so far, we will be able to respect the scheduled term of delivery for the 1 MW plant, and to anticipate our ability to put in the market an E-Cat for everybody.”

So there is pressure on a good number of fronts — financial, time, technical difficulties, and from competitors — but he appears to be doing his best to work through them all. As news of this technology continues to spread, and the October deadline gets ever nearer, those pressures are likely to rise.

The stakes in the E-Cat story are extremely high, since so many of our world’s problems can be traced back to energy-related issues. There would be surprise and much excitement around the if a new and much improved source of energy was firmly demonstrated, and many observers are watching and waiting to see if Rossi can pull everything together to do that in the last week of October — only six weeks away now.