Dirt-cheap, clean energy that can be produced from distributed sources — the holy grail of energy managers — may be just round the bend, but an inventor-investor fracas is holding it up.
The invention is an energy box and its description reads like magic. You put in nickel and a compound of lithium and hydrogen – and the machine produces heat. It is on the cusp of being commercialised, and could demolish the existing global energy systems. When Andrea Rossi invented the energy machine about eight years ago, an incredulous scientific community promptly branded the Italian engineer a fraud. The reason was that the machine, which Rossi christened ‘E-Cat’, seemed to be working on the principle of nuclear fusion – conventional wisdom has it that no fusion reaction is possible except at extremely high temperatures, such as the Sun’s.
However, a few independent tests, such as the one conducted by a group of scientists at Lugano, Switzerland, and a Russian scientist, Dr Alexander Parkhimov, confirmed the results, though they said they could not scientifically explain how the E-Cat worked.
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