Editor’s Note: Tom Casten founded and led multiple companies over thirty-nine years that successfully deployed the commercial model proposed by Leonardo Corp of using private capital to fund industrial heat and power plants in return for long-term contracts to supply customer heat and power. He knows a great deal about the science, technology, and economics of supplying industrial and institutional heat and power. We asked Casten to review the new E-Cat presentations and provide his take on the technical and commercial likelihood that this renamed approach to cold fusion could work and provide useful energy to the world’s industrial and institutional users, as claimed by founder Andrea Rossi.
I n 1989, Fleischman and Pons claimed they had achieved “cold fusion,” which could release the incredible energy of fusion without the bother of containing the incredible temperatures and scale of fusion in stars. Alas, other scientists could not replicate the results. A few believers hung on and renamed the process Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) to avoid the association with the discredited term cold fusion. One Italian gentleman, Andrea Rossi, apparently focused on the rebranded cold fusion while in jail in Italy for defrauding investors. In January 2019, Rossi posted a video stating that his company, Leonardo, was ready to sell a device dubbed “E-Cat” to creditworthy industrial companies.
I watched the entire three-hour E-Cat video but did not find the claims credible with respect to energy conversion technology, materials to handle the plasma temperatures, or even documentation of the basic energy inputs and outputs. Here’s an overview.