There’s not a huge amount of detail provided here, but it’s always interesting for me to get any information about the first 1 MW plant which we suppose will be put into action, and made public, sometime this year. The following is an exchange between a reader and Andrea Rossi on the Journal of Nuclear Physics from yesterday:
DTravchenko
July 29th, 2014 at 2:01 PM
Dr Andrea Rossi:
Another question: the 1 MW plant that is going in operation in the factory of a US customer how many hours per year will work?
Warm Regards,
D.T.Andrea Rossi
July 29th, 2014 at 4:44 PM
DTravchenko:
The plant has to work 24 hours/ day for 350 days/year, producing 1 MWh/h of heat in the form of steam.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
350 days x 24 hours makes for 8400 hours of operation — probably continuous. My guess from the numbers that Rossi provides is the factory where the plant will be instaled might have a scheduled two-week shut-down period for maintenance purposes. I guess there are hundreds or thousands of industrial processes that could require continuous heat in the form of steam, so it’s not possible to guess what kind of production is involved here — but Rossi talks about ‘heat in the form of steam’ here, so it appears that this will be a ‘low temperature’ E-Cat application.
If Industrial Heat can provide heat to these specifications at significant savings for the customer over alternatives, this will be a real landmark achievement in the history of technology. Not only will there be the immediate cost benefit to the customer, but I think more importantly, it will demonstrate the arrival of a previously unknown (and widely regarded as impossible) energy source that is an improvement on anything we have used before, and I would expect that publicly demonstrating it work successfully will get a lot of people interested very quickly.