It’s been a while since Swedish journalist Mats Lewan has commented here about the E-Cat, and I was pleased to read this comment today which I think would be interesting to readers here, since Mats has been following the E-Cat story from the very beginning. Incidentally, a video of Mats’ presentation at the 2019 Global BEM has recently been posted on Youtube, and that prompted Mats to make the post below.
Mats’ comment in full:
Hi Gerard, I am not sure I remember all the details of my presentation at Global BEM (I haven’t watched the video yet), but here’s my view as of today:
I think the SK was potentially commercial, but when Andrea started to do experiments with direct extraction of electric energy, I think he realised the huge advantage of this, and that the SK in that perspective became less relevant to develop further for market introduction. Also, as far as I have understood, the SKL is much less complex and therefore much cheaper to produce and maintain.
From that perspective, continuing to push the SK didn’t make sense, even though heating is a huge market. If you have a better, cheaper, and less complex product that produces electricity in stead of heat, you just use the electricity to produce heat.
As for the SKL, I was involved in some attempts to make an independent and conclusive test happen, but among other things, covid came in between.
Now, my understanding is that SKL has some way to go as an electricity generator. A combination with a battery is the logical set-up, for making it support various types of loads, for serving as a capacity buffer, and for making it self-sustained. I would be surprised if Andrea hasn’t tested this already, but some R&D plus engineering certainly remain.
If you look at the car industry e.g., you could probably use any electric/fuel-cell design—where the battery is used for buffering and for capacity variation, in combination with the fuel-cell with its fairly constant output—and switch the fuel-cell with and SKL as the electricity generator.
With the SKL having some way to go, and also being a more complex product to introduce to the market, the SKLed is in my view an excellent first product. It is simple, low-cost, useful, and easy to understand. If it starts to spread, it will also force businesses in all industries, to relate to its existence, and all discussions on whether the process is possible or not from a physics point of view will then become obsolete.
As for your last questions—I don’t plan for any interview with Andrea at this point. But I might be involved in the presentation on November 25. We will see.
EDITED/ADDED: I should add two things:
– My understanding is that nuclear reactions look less and less as a viable model from a physics point of view for explaining the process in the Ecat and in other similar processes being developed, and that the hypothesis on extraction of energy from the structured vacuum is gaining support.
– The general public and all major industries still don’t consider the possibility of discovering/inventing a new way of producing energy at all, when discussing how we could phase out fossil fuels (for climate reasons, but also for health/pollution reasons, which I often emphasise). I see this particularly in the transportation industry, where I am currently doing work on future analysis, and where such a possibility is completely absent in all discussions. On the other hand, I think it is a good thing that societies and industries have developed an awareness on the importance of energy efficiency, sustainability, circular economy etc, which most probably wouldn’t have happened if a new, abundant, clean, cheap, and carbon-free energy source would have surfaced to common knowledge ten years ago.
