Yesterday, Jan. 31, inventor Andrea Rossi presented his heating device E-Cat SK, with a claimed output of 22 kW at high temperatures from minute amounts of harmless fuel, lasting at least one year. Main take-away: Rossi is now taking orders in the US, Sweden, and Japan, with delivery times of weeks. Now we’re waiting for customers to speak out.

I watched yesterday’s presentation from Stockholm together with a group of persons being interested in the development of the E-Cat. Several of them thought, as many others who watched the presentation online, that the level of he presentation from a commercial perspective was low.

And it’s true that it was not the high level well-directed slick presentation you would expect from a global launch of a potentially world changing product (although I really appreciated the ironic and humorous opening with the two puppets representing Rossi and Galilei—great style!). Instead, it was the typical very essential and non-polished presentation by an inventor who cares first and foremost about the technology and its characteristics (see video below, with an automatic transcript here, and an edited list of the video contents here).

I think, however, that the presentation served its purpose, and that he can receive professional assistance further ahead when the presentation style will be more important. At this point, it would not be in Rossi’s interest to get too much attention, risking to be overloaded by questions and orders that he might not cope with. Instead, despite the presentation style, the core message got through:

• Rossi is now taking orders from customers in the US, Sweden and Japan, wanting to buy heat at a competitive price (20 percent below market price, subject to negotiation for larger installations), with a delivery time of weeks after the date of order.
• The customer must have an activity with a stable history, being financially stable, having a need for heat in the order of the output of one or several E-Cat SK (each producing 22 kW), having staff that can be trained according to the safety certification, and an engineer competent in the field.
• Since there might be interruptions in the heat delivery—as I understood Rossi, the E-Cat will be turned off if the internet connection used for remote control goes down—the customer must also have an automatic backup from a conventional heat source.

Apart from the specifications I reported in my last blog post, we also learned that:

• the claimed COP (Coefficient of Performance—Output power/Input power) for the entire device is 57, with the electric input power being 380 W. However, the electric power is supposedly consumed almost entirely for cooling of the control panel and that heat is being reused at the output. The claimed power consumption of the E-Cat SK reactor is 0.8 mW, meaning that the COP for the reactor alone would be in the order of tens of millions.
• The reactor could have a lifetime of about 20 years.
• The fuel charge lasts at least one year, but it could last longer—Rossi has run the reactor for a year on the same fuel charge and it has never been depleted.
• The weight of the E-Cat SK is 9.1 kg.
• Rossi believes that the agriculture and food industry could be among the first to benefit from heat produced by the E-Cat SK.
• Introduction of domestic E-Cat models will be based on certification that can be done only after a long time experience from a significant number of industrial installations.
• Over time, Rossi would consider sales of the device in itself, but not in the first phase when the IP has to be protected.

As I wrote in the last blog post, obviously nothing of this is proven, and we will know for sure if the claims are valid only when one or two customers disclose themselves and report if they are satisfied or not. Rossi mentioned that one reason for customers not to speak out is that there are a few persons, at least two, harassing everyone connected with Rossi and the E-Cat, among other things focusing on risks from radiation (the process does not emit any ionising radiation).

But again—even though the presentation could be considered to be sloppy, the message is clear: Orders for heat produced commercially by the E-Cat SK can now be made, with delivery within weeks.

Meanwhile, there is also competition reinforcing the claim that the LENR process is valid (albeit yet without a confirmed physical explanation). US-based Brillouin Energy claimed in December 2018 that it has achieved an output power of 50 to 100 watts, with a COP of 2 in a similar process with similar elements involved (reported in the Next Big Future, which wrongly states that COP above 1 is impossible with chemical reactions; any log fire has an infinite COP since there is no input power—the difference lies in the energy density, i.e. the amount of energy produced per amount of fuel).

Yesterday, Brillouin also announced in a press release that a patent for part of the process had been granted.

And in November and December 2018, Brilliant Light Power, BLP, claimed progress with a different process based on what the inventor Randell Mills says is based on an ultra-low energy state of the hydrogen atom called hydrino, yet having a similar light spectrum as that produced by the E-Cat SK. BLP claims that the process releases power in the order of 500,000 kW, at a COP of 200 to 500, and that it has been running continuously for ten minutes.

Another recent news was an investment by Mitsubishi in the Japanese company Clean Planet, working with a technology called New Hydrogen Energy, apparently also in the field of LENR.

Also in Russia interesting scientific work is being done within LENR, some of which is listed in this summary by the Russian technology startup Syntestech.

In other words—Rossi might be the first of a series of technology companies launching a commercial energy service based on LENR, which is still considered to be impossible by many scientists, yet having the potential to disrupt the energy sector and to bring huge change to the world.

The presentation yesterday might therefore have been a historical moment, and now we’re waiting for a customer to speak out in order to know for sure.

Note: The image at the top shows the transparent tube enclosing the plasma of the reactor core in an early prototype of the E-Cat QX, on which the E-Cat SK is based. The photo was made with an ordinary SLR camera without particular filters or protections (200mm lens, ISO 800, f5.6, 1/80s), the light not being particularly strong to watch with unprotected eyes.

Note 2: Also read a good summary of the event by Frank Acland, the owner of E-Cat World, who was helping Rossi with the presentation.