The following guest post has been submitted by Rick Allen
Solar power is popular and growing fast. Almost every day I read about a new program to put solar panels on homes, a new solar “farm” being constructed, or a breakthrough in photovoltaic panel efficiency. The cost per watt of solar power is also dropping rapidly. Not counting installation costs – which can cost more than the panels themselves – you can buy solar panels for less than a dollar a watt. In some areas, generating electricity via solar panels costs no more than doing so with natural gas or coal. This sounds really good to most people; we need alternatives to dirty, polluting, and expensive fossil fuels. However, there is another source of power that to me makes solar look almost insignificant – Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat.
Even if the price of solar panels continues to drop, photovoltaic technology has drawbacks that simply cannot be overcome. First, to utilize solar panels to produce a significant quantity of power you need space. You can’t tuck a solar panel into a small, compact box and expect it to produce power. A large rooftop or open space is needed. For a solar farm, hundreds or thousands of acres may be required. Secondly, photovoltaic panels cannot produce power at night. Except for a very few experimental panels that have the capability of collecting power from stray infrared light, solar panels produce zero watts after the sun goes down (unless maybe they convert a few rays of light from a full moon).
Because of the above issues with solar panels, you will never be able to fit enough on an ordinary vehicle to produce the kind of power produced by internal combustion engines. Also, all sorts of other problems emerge: how to store excess power produced in the day for use at night, how to build huge solar farms without harming the environment, and how to reduce installation costs. Thankfully, the E-Cat does not suffer from these problems. Unlike solar panels, an E-Cat can operate 24/7 and requires a much smaller amount of space. A nickel-hydrogen device could operate from a small space in the back of your garage.
We have now learned from Andrea Rossi that ‘vast’ R&D is taking place at Industrial Heat into combining solar power and E-Cat technology — I think this is a waste. If the COP of the E-Cat is high enough, closed looping a unit should be relatively simple. Once an E-Cat is closed looped – so a fraction of the output is used to provide power for the drive – it is an ideal source of power. E-Cat generators could be designed to be large enough to power large cities or small enough to power individual appliances. The disruption that a massive shift to nickel-hydrogen power may create chaos in the financial markets, but it needs to happen.
I personally think the E-Cat is the future. Even if another exotic energy technology is discovered, I think nickel hydrogen has the potential to be an extremely cheap source of power for hundreds of years to come. Let’s review the facts:
- The E-Cat can operate for several months at a time between refueling.
- The E-Cat consumes only tiny amounts of nickel powder, hydrogen gas, and catalysts.
- No radioactive materials are used, or radioactive waste produced.
- No rare earth elements are used.
- The E-Cat can produce stable temperatures exceeding 1100C.
- The E-Cat can produce power any time of the day or night — no need for sunlight.
You can’t get much better than this. If the E-Cat can produce basically free high temperature heat, then that heat can be converted to electricity by one of many methods. Today, 90% or more of the world’s power is generated by steam at a temperature of less than 500C. The E-Cat EXCEEDS our needs!
I’m excited about the future of the E-Cat. Once the world accepts that it is absolutely and totally real, there will be a race between hundreds of companies to reproduce the technology. In no time, there will be dozens of different versions of the technology being used. When that happens, there will no longer be a need for conventional renewable power. Instead of filling your roof up with solar panels, you will be able to buy a small E-Cat generator, the size of an air conditioner, to power your home.
Let’s hope that solar power and all other renewable sources of power are allowed to die. There is no need to hold onto the past when the answer to all of our energy needs is here.
Rick Allen