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LENR Could Allow for Accomplishment of Obama Climate Goal

Today President Barack Obama is to announce a clean power plan with the goal of cutting US greenhouse gas emissions from power stations by 32% by 2030 in comparison to 2005 levels.

It appears that this is going to become a major issue in US politics and business, and already representatives from the coal industry are vowing to fight the president’s move, since coal power plants would be the most likely targets of these new goals. Coal power plants produced 39 per cent of electricity in the United States in 2014. Natural gas plants are also likely to face pressure, since they produce significant levels of carbon (although less than coal plants).

Assuming overall US consumption of energy will not drop by a third in 15 years, where is the clean energy expected to come from? The conventional wisdom would say that wind and solar will have to pick up part of the slack — maybe new nuclear plants too. Carbon capture and storage at fossil fuel plants have been proposed by some as a clean way to stick with the traditional fuels.

However, what very few people are considering is that Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat is a likely candidate for a technology that could help achieve rapid and significant carbon reduction in a short period of time, while making possible the continued production of energy levels needed to maintain a modern civilization.

From all I have been able to learn, Rossi’s Hot Cat appears to be a technology ideally suited for electricity generation on large scales. Admittedly, at this point we don’t have a Hot Cat power plant, even in prototype form, but it seems that the essential technological know-how is in place to make commercial plants possible. Yesterday on the Journal of Nuclear Physics, Rossi estimated that he forsees E-Cat applications in the heating and power production field in the next five years.

If Andrea Rossi is able to commercialize his E-Cat, what about other LENR technology? Once it is established that the E-Cat is commercially viable, I anticipate that many other researchers will move seriously into the field to find ways to harness the LENR phenomenon. Rossi and the E-Cat seem to be the leaders at the moment, but I think competition will come from many sources and improvements over the E-Cat could likely emerge.

President Obama is looking for a transformation of the energy landscape, and I think we are at a time where transformation is possible — but with a technology that could far exceed what most conventional thinking is expecting at the moment. I do expect that when the benefits of LENR become well established, it will become widely seen as a leading candidate for moving clean energy forward.

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