Where would the LENR field be without Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat? It’s a question I’ve been pondering lately as the LENR world has been rather turned on its head with the recent news of the court case filed by Andrea Rossi against Industrial Heat. For me the interest in the E-Cat as a technology has always been more important than the people and companies involved. If real, this is an incredibly significant discovery/invention.
I had known about cold fusion for a long time, but hadn’t paid much attention to it since the Pons and Fleischmann affair, and until Rossi and Focardi came on the scene in 2011 I didn’t really think of CF/LENR as being a potentially commercially viable technology. While interesting results had been claimed by various researchers, it seemed to be rather an obscure field confined to laboratory experiments, with only modest levels of excess energy claimed.
The E-Cat changed that for me. Because of the early experiments in 2011 showing kilowatts of excess energy being produced I began to consider LENR as technology with the potential to have a profound impact on the world, and this has kept my interest ever since. E-Cat World has been published for over five years now. I did not think when the site was launched that after five years we would still be waiting for E-Cats to be distributed into the marketplace — but here we are.
However, although it’s been a long wait, speaking for myself, I still think there is very good reason to expect good things from the E-Cat in the future. But even without the E-Cat itself on the market yet, there has been a definite resurgence in interest in the LENR field because of Andrea Rossi’s work. There are groups and individuals working in the commercial sector, and in the open source arena who have been motivated to try and replicate the E-Cat, or something similar. I don’t doubt that there are others working in secret as well.
It’s interesting to me that all this activity is taking place despite the world of government, science, industry and media largely ignoring it (publicly), or dismissing it as foolishness. LENR is still very much in the underground of the internet. If E-Cats start to go on sale, and especially if the E-Cat QuarkX can be shown clearly to produce significant amounts of heat, light and electricity without energy input, I think the level of interest in LENR would increase dramatically, and even greater efforts will go into replicating the Rossi Effect — or trying something similar, perhaps even better.
Without the E-Cat coming along, I think that the field of LENR would still be a rather quiet place, with much less activity and interest than there is now, and with barely any commercial prospects. We don’t know what the outcome of the Rossi/IH court case will be, but I think the E-Cat will be shown to be a viable technology regardless of legal rulings. As things stand now, I think we could well be on the threshold of a revolution in energy technology because of the E-Cat.