Announcement

**bsteadman** · 11-29-2013, 11:19 PM

Why I'm Certain That The Rossi E-Cat Doesn't Work As Advertised

Forbes
Tim Worstall
11/29/2013

Excerpt:

Please do note that this is personal opinion: I think that the Rossi E-Cat doesn’t work as advertised, this is not a categorical statement that it cannot nor that anyone involved is acting in anything less than the most honest and upright manner. But it is very much my opinion that it doesn’t work. And while the physics we’re offered to explain why it might seems pretty kooky to me the real reason I’ve reached this opinion is that the economics of their actions simply don’t stand up.

What’s prompted this is the news that they’re actually going to put the machine on sale in the near future:

Leonardo Corp says it’s now accepting pre-orders for its “energy catalyzer” product, with delivery expected within four months.

The “Ecat” is a controversial product: although it’s been claimed to deliver more output power than input power in “black box” experiments, the mechanism by which the “low energy nuclear fusion” reaction happens is treated with scepticism by physicists. The Ecat purportedly attaches hydrogen atoms to nickel, according to its inventor Andrea Rossi, with energy and copper as the outputs.

On the chemistry of this I rather doubt it. We know what happens when you add hydrogen to nickel: you get nickel hydride. And people have been making this for some time and more crucially, recycling it. And copper is, in the technical jargon, what we call a “poison” in nickel. It’s something you control for very strongly, continually check that you nickel hasn’t become contaminated with copper. So, if adding hydrogen to nickel did create copper we rather think that we would have seen it by now.

On the physics of it there doesn’t seem to be any way for it to work without throwing off large (and lethal) amounts of gamma radiation. The sort of amount that you want to be behind a foot of lead if it’s happening anywhere near you. So again I seriously doubt it.

But it is true that our knowledge of chemistry and physics is not as yet perfect so there is still some miniscule chance that the machine does work.

At which point I want to tell you about a guy in Scottsdale, Arizona, who tried to convince me some 15 years ago that he had discovered another form of low energy nuclear transformation. Except this one transmuted lead into gold. He even gave me a slug of lead that I had tested and it did indeed contain some silver and gold. The silver’s not all that much of a surprise as even the Romans knew that certain lead ores contain silver and it can be extracted rather messily (although they got slaves to do it and they didn’t mind that they all died from inhaling lead fumes). Gold is a bit more of a surprise though.

However, even though I had that proof in my hands I didn’t invest and I made very sure that no one I knew did either. Because, if you can turn lead into gold then why on earth would you need investment? At the time lead was $400 per tonne and gold around $12 million. Even if you’ve only got a little lab set up, able to process a few ounces of lead a day, say, and you’re then selling that small production to one of the “we buy gold shops” you’ll still be cash flow positive from day one. And he obviously did have a lab set up otherwise how could he have created the slug of gold containing lead he gave me (a slug that one of those gold shops offered me $50 for)?

The economics just didn’t stand up. If he had what he said he did then he didn’t need money. That he was asking for money meant that he didn’t have what he said (or thought, although in this case it was obviously a swindle, a scam) he did.

Which brings us back to Rossi’s E-Cat. The claim is that these little machines can generate power through this process. And he has some of them already. Something that generates power more cheaply than the current methods we use to do it is a money maker. You can just sign up to a feed in tariff in many countries and start feeding your cheap juice into the grid. Some places might insist that you can only feed in solar or wind energy but that’s easy enough to fake. And all of these places also pay you very good and high rates for that feed in electricity. A year, 18 months back you could get 40p a kWhr for solar being fed into the UK grid. It’s fallen now for new installations but it’s still twice the value for the FiT than the cost of regular electricity.

So, Rossi could be, if he has machines that do what he claims they can do, making money, being cash flow positive, simply by hooking up the machines he’s got to the grid. And given the claims he’s making it would be markedly profitable too. Back of the envelope stuff says that even this new system that he’s hawking for $1.5 million a pop would have a payback period of only a year. So in year two he would have two such machines, your three four and so on.
...........................................

View the complete article at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworst...as-advertised/

**bsteadman** · 01-25-2014, 07:01 PM

Industrial Heat Has Acquired Andrea Rossi's E-Cat Technology

- Company focused on making the technology widely available -

PR Newswire
1/24/2014

Excerpt:

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, N.C., Jan. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Industrial Heat, LLC announced today that it has acquired the rights to Andrea Rossi's Italian low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology, the Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat). A primary goal of the company is to make the technology widely available, because of its potential impact on air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and biomass.

"The world needs a new, clean and efficient energy source. Such a technology would raise the standard of living in developing countries and reduce the environmental impact of producing energy," said JT Vaughn speaking on behalf of Industrial Heat (IH).

Mr. Vaughn confirmed IH acquired the intellectual property and licensing rights to Rossi's LENR device after an independent committee of European scientists conducted two multi-day tests at Rossi's facilities in Italy.

The published report by the European committee concluded, "Even by the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources" [referring to energy output per unit of mass]. The report is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3913. In addition, performance validation tests were conducted in the presence of IH personnel and certified by an independent expert.

Since acquiring Rossi's technology, IH has engaged in a broad-based effort to protect it by preparing numerous patent applications related to the core technology as well as associated designs and uses.

Tom Darden, who co-founded Cherokee Investment Partners, a series of private equity funds specializing in cleaning up pollution, is a founding investor in Industrial Heat. He is one of a small group of like-minded investors who are supporting this technology because it could significantly address a number of social and environmental challenges. They have committed to make it broadly available because of its potential for impact. IH is considering partnerships with industry participants, universities and NGO's to ensure the technology is developed in a thoughtful and responsible manner.

JT Vaughn manages Industrial Heat. He is the founder of Cherokee McDonough Challenge, an accelerator for environmental startups, and a leader in the startup community in the Research Triangle.
.............................................

View the complete article at:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea...241853361.html

**bsteadman** · 08-24-2014, 12:31 AM

E-Cat Owner’s Connections to GE/North Carolina Company Revealed

LENR & Cold Fusion News
jennifer
8/23/2014

Excerpt:

The North Carolina company that purchased Andrea Rossi’s e-cat Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) technology Industrial Heat LLC could have some connections to General Electric (GE) and a North Carolina company called Power Generation Services, Inc. or PoGens.

Power Generation which claims provide a complete energy management infrastructure could be the mysterious company where Rossi claims the one megawatt Ecat unit was shipped to for testing. Power Generation apparently provides a variety of services to utility companies. General Electric is not listed as a partner on Power Generation’s site.

Interestingly enough a company called PCX Corporation LLC according to its website PCX provides large scale generators or electrical distribution centers for data centers and industry. These include uninterruptable power systems which keep the lights on and the equipment working when the grid goes down. Pictures of some of the centers on PCX’s website show generation units that look a lot like some of the pictures we’ve seen of Rossi’s one megawatt ecat.

Even though it is not a partner in Power Generation, a Jan. 28, 2014, PoGens press release notes that GE’s Digital Energy business made a strategic investment in the company.

“We have been working closely with GE for the past year and this investment accelerates the integration of GE’s energy infrastructure technologies,” Power Generation’s CEO Jim Szyperski said in the press release.

The Power Generation/Industrial Heat connection is pretty tenuous though. The E-cat World website concluded the relationship exists because the names James Kevin Szyperski and Thomas Francis Darden appear on US Patent Application US20130076140 A1.

Darden is the head of Cherokee Investment Partners and a principal investor in Industrial Heat LLC. Like Power Generation, both Industrial Heat and Cherokee Investment Partners are based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The patent is labeled “Systems and methods for microgrid power generation and management.” That means the creation of small-scale electricity generation as an alternative to the grid or a backup to the grid. Since the grid is becoming increasingly unreliable and expensive this is going to be increasingly big business in the years ahead.

Obviously something like LENR would be the logical power source for such a system, since it is small, nonpolluting and high in energy density unlike solar panels or wind turbines. If Darden could combine Rossi’s ecat with such a microgrid and make it work he would have his hands on a fortune. Naturally GE which has been in the electricity business since Thomas Edison’s day would be one of the logical customers.

GE’s investment is intriguing because it is a publicly traded Fortune 500 company. General builds everything from computers to jet engines which are a possible use for LENR. One of its areas of expertise is turbines which could be powered by LENR. Uses for these turbines include locomotives for the railroads.
..........................................

View the complete article at:

http://coldfusion3.com/blog/e-cat-ow...mpany-revealed

**bsteadman** · 09-23-2015, 03:34 PM

1 MW E-Cat Plant Watch Thread [UPDATE #30: Rossi on Reactors and Repairs]

E-Cat World
Frank Acland
9/21/2015

Excerpt:

Since there are beginning to be more frequent references to the 1 MW E-Cat plant that we have been told will be installed and be open to visitors at some point (perhaps this year, according to Andrea Rossi), I thought I would create a dedicated thread to the topic which I will update as needed, like I have done with the thread about the third party report. It keeps all the information together and I think makes things easier to find.

UPDATE #30 (Sep 21, 2015)

I asked Andrea Rossi some questions regarding the condition of the plant, and about the repairs that have been done on the reactors. I have included his responses after each question.

Dear Andrea,

You have made a number of repairs on reactors over the course of this long-term test.

1. Have you changed any of the fuel or charge in any of the reactors yet? AR: no
2. Are you using the same reactors as when you started? AR: yes
3. Have your repairs involved replacing components and/or materials surrounding the reactors? AR: yes
4. Have you been successful in your repairs in reducing the amount of problems with the E-Cats? AR: yes

I followed up with another question: “Regarding repairs you have had to make on your reactors again, are they mainly connected with materials degradation caused by long-term heat exposure?”

AR: I would say yes, and we learnt much about new mterials to be used instead.

UPDATE #29 (Sep 20, 2015)

Andrea Rossi was asked directly today when the 1 MW plant would be over and he gave this response: “The tests should end by February 2016, so long no major delays are caused by malfunctions.”

So that makes me guess that the total downtime so far has probably been between 1 and 2 weeks.

UPDATE #28 (Sep 19, 2015)

There’s some interesting information on the Journal of Nuclear Physics about the amount of down time that has been during the current test of the 1 MW plant. A reader asked Andrea Rossi about how many days the plant has been down since the test started on Feb 20th this year. These were the options to choose from:

1) less than but equal to 24 hours?
2) greater than 24 hours but less than or equal to 7 days?
3) greater than 7 days but less than or equal to 4 weeks?
4) greater than 4 weeks?

Andrea Rossi responded: “3”. This means that for the test to run 350 days in total, the ending would be pushed back to at least February 10th, and as far as March 3rd, 2016. And this means the counter I have been running is not accurate — I think I better take it down!

UPDATE #27 (Sep 18, 2015)

By my calculations, based on what Andrea Rossi said in update #26 below, the 1 MW plant has been running for 207 days now, and the test in progress is supposed to run for 350 days. On the Journal of Nuclear Physics today Rossi was asked that if the test were to end today, would he consider the results positive or negative.

His response was: “Positive with the potential risk to become negative.”

I take this to mean that the plant has been operating well, producing energy via the ‘Rossi effect’ at a significant COP — however it has not been running long enough for Rossi to declare final victory. So far, so good, but the 350 day milestone seems to be the finish line that has yet to be reached.
...............................................

View the complete report at:

http://www.e-catworld.com/2015/09/21...y-competitive/

**bsteadman** · 04-08-2016, 03:44 PM

Scientist sues Raleigh cold fusion startup, Cherokee Investment Partners over $89M licensing fee

Triangle Business Journal
By Lauren K. Ohnesorge
4/7/2016

Excerpt:

A scientist is suing a Raleigh startup, alleging both the venture and its investors owe him $89 million for a cold-fusion invention he insists he's validated.

Italian inventor Andrea Rossi is suing Raleigh investors Thomas Darden and JT Vaughn, along with their companies, investment firm Cherokee Investment Partners and clean-tech startup Industrial Heat.

At the heart of the suit is a controversial invention Rossi calls the “Energy Catalyzer” or “E-Cat," a black box he claims generates a low energy nuclear reaction – cold fusion. If it works, it’s a cheaper, greener way to generate a huge amount of energy, no coal plant required.

Rossi, an Italian inventor who says he’s been working on the technology for two decades, claims patents in the United States and Europe for the technology. But the cold-fusion concept it’s based on may be as controversial as its creator, who himself has been the subject of global scrutiny as multiple critics have tried to discredit his reports over the years.

Darden, in a recent interview, said the potential benefits of Rossi's science were worth banking on – even with mainstream scientists publicly doubting the feasibility that cold fusion can even happen.

“There is a lot of cold fusion work going on right now," he said last October. "People don’t talk about it very much because it is so controversial they tend to get shut down.”

In the suit filed Tuesday, Rossi claims Darden and Vaughn contacted him in 2012 about licensing his science for $100.5 million.

According to the complaint, the sum of $1.5 million was to be paid upon the execution of the license agreement, with $10 million to be paid upon successful completion of a 24-hour validation test. Rossi further claims that the remaining $89 million would be paid after a 350-day test period, with both tests to be performed by independent experts. Darden and Vaughn created a company to research the technology, Raleigh-based Industrial Heat.

Both the licensing payment and the first test fee were paid and in 2013 an E-Cat Unit was delivered to a Raleigh facility to prepare for the final test, the suit alleges. That’s where Rossi says the deal started to sour, with Industrial Heat’s alleged “inability or failure to secure an adequate facility” where the test could be completed, preventing him from completing that final milestone in accordance with the initial agreement.

According to the suit, he found his own testing location and conducted a test in Miami. He says Darden agreed to the terms and, in February 2015, an E-Cat test commenced, with Industrial Heat representatives present. In the meantime, Industrial Heat was raising money and publicly talking about its licensing agreement with Rossi, the suit alleges.

Rossi claims the Miami test shows the E-Cat produced 50 times more energy than it consumed, and that a final report was published last month. He says Darden and his cohorts refused to pay the final $89 million and is suing for breach of contract, demanding a jury trial. Netherlands firm IPH International (referred to as Industrial Heat's assignee in the suit) is also listed as a defendant. Rossi's company, Leonardo Corporation, is listed as a co-plaintiff.

Darden was unable to comment on the suit Thursday. Vaughn told Triangle Business Journal in a prepared statement that Industrial Heat is aware of the lawsuit, calling it "without merit."

"Industrial Heat has worked for over three years to substantiate the results claimed by Mr. Rossi from the E-Cat technology – all without success," the statement reads, adding that Leonardo Corporation and Ross "have repeatedly breached their agreements."

The defendants plan to "vigorously" defend themselves against the suit.
...........................................

View the complete article, including image, at:

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/...n-startup.html

**bsteadman** · 05-18-2016, 02:51 PM

Woodford tech holding hit by fraud claim

Industrial Heat, a technology company backed by Neil Woodford, hit by $89 million lawsuit from scientist in dispute over claimed invention.

CityWire
by Daniel Grote
5/17/2016

Excerpt:

A technology company backed by star fund manager Neil Woodford has been hit with a lawsuit by a scientist who claims he is owed $89 million (£61 million) for the use of his invention.

Industrial Heat, an energy technology company held by the manager’s Woodford Equity Income investment trust, has been hit by the legal action from Andrea Rossi, a scientist who claims to have invented a ‘low energy nuclear reaction’ device.

This approach has been shunned by the scientific mainstream but claims to be able to generate energy at more moderate conditions than the high temperatures required for other forms of nuclear fusion.

Rossi has claimed that Industrial Heat has ‘systematically defrauded’ his intellectual property rights to the ‘energy catalyser’, or E-Cat.

According to the lawsuit, in 2012, Rossi granted Industrial Heat a licence to use the intellectual property behind the E-Cat in a series of countries.

It claims that as part of the deal, Rossi would be paid $1.5 million (£1.04 million) once the agreement was struck, $10 million after a 24-hour test of the device, and a further $89 million following a 350-day test.

While the first two payments were made, Rossi is now claiming the $89 million payment, arguing the 350-day test had been proved successful.

He argued that Industrial Heat’s claim to the intellectual property behind the device had been crucial to its fundraising.
.................................................. ...........

View the complete article at:

http://citywire.co.uk/money/woodford...-claim/a911347

**bsteadman** · 07-24-2017, 08:23 PM

Getting The License Back Was Rossi’s Top Priority

APEnergy
by vlad
7/22/2017

Excerpt:

From An Impossible Invention: Here’s The Settlement—Getting The License Back Was Rossi’s Top Priority by Mats Lewan

In the settlement between Rossi and his US licensee IH, Rossi got the license back together with all E-Cat equipment and materials, while none of the parties will have to pay damages to the other. Getting the license back was his top priority all the time, Rossi explains in this interview.

[Here’s the document defining the terms of the settlement (un-disclosed source)].

“To us, the most important thing was to regain complete ownership of the IP and of all the rights that were conceded through the license. At this point, it had become very clear that a continued collaboration had become impossible because of the choices IH made and because of other reasons. The development, the finalization, and the distribution of the technology—any agreement regarding this would have been impossible,” Rossi told me during an interview via Skype on July 15.

.................................................. ..................

View the complete post at:

http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?...ticle&sid=3766

Announcement

E-Cat Technology - News on Commercialization

E-Cat Technology - News on Commercialization

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment