E-Cat SK 2019: Heat on lease instead of a power plant to buy

This time there was a livestream instead of a press conference. Andrea Rossi had initially invited the editors of the NET-Journal, among others, to an international presentation, but in December 2018 he announced that the demonstration would take place online only. The reason was easy to guess: the location of the devices was to remain secret.

The product

On 31 January 2019, in a livestream lasting almost three hours, Rossi presented the E-Cat SK – according to him, after a year of successful tests:

• rated output of 22 kilowatts of heat per unit, with several units controllable centrally
• intended for process heat and space heating, initially only for industrial and commercial customers
• no purchase, but leasing: the customer pays only for the heat, at 20 per cent below the local price level of other heat generators; maintenance included

The long road

The NET-Journal placed the market launch in the context of its own history with Rossi: in 2011 and 2012 he had shown the editors large 1-megawatt plants in Bologna with a performance ratio of 6 to 1 – twice as efficient as a conventional heat pump. After the break with his US partner in 2016, Rossi had, it said, deliberately developed the technology further until it was ready for the market. The editors thus saw – decades after the experiments of Fleischmann and Pons – the first commercial “cold fusion” products on the market.

Assessment

A leasing model in which the customer pays only for the heat delivered would in itself be a convincing way of introducing a new technology without risk to the customer. What would then be decisive, however, are reference customers who disclose their heating bills. No such independently confirmed installations of the E-Cat SK are documented in the NET-Journal, and later research did not find any either.

The series: the E-Cat (Andrea Rossi) in the NET-Journal

• 2011: The nickel-hydrogen demonstration in Bologna
• 2018: A one-centimetre reactor in Stockholm
• 2019: Heat on lease instead of a power plant to buy (this article)
• 2022: 100 watts from a box – once there are a million orders
• 2024: The Twizy comparison in Latina
• 2025: Production plans – and what can be seen of them in 2026

Sources: NET-Journal (Jupiter-Verlag) 3/4 2019, pp. 13–17. Text and diagram: GAIA editorial team.