I have a colleague who was developing an organic photovoltaic cell and at one time we looked into what it would cost to set up solar panel manufacturing facility. A single assembly line, highly automated, would cost about $12M, and would run 24/7 and assemble ~20MW of panels per month. There are a few companies who specialize in automation of solar panel manufacturing, and they would provide the whole kitten-caboodle -- the design, engineering, procurement, installation and training for that given price.
I think the comparison may be reasonable to the e-cat. Like the e-cat, a solar panel is fairly simple. The only real sophistication needed is placing the individual cells onto the support panel, and then welding/soldering the bus-wires without breaking the cells as they are quite fragile. Not much in the e-cat that is fragile. I would guess that a single manufacturing line for e-cats would be less than $10M, NOT including the actual reactor core with the nickel-powder. I think Rossi is going to keep the production of the reactor core 'under wraps'. To get volume, just install multiple 'lines'. -Mark From: Wolf Fischer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 5:57 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Vo]:Ecat production will be robotized... Hi all, Rossi made the following statement on his journal: Andrea Rossi January 10th, 2012 at 4:05 PM Dear Keith W: We are making the certification . Attention: I did not say that we will begin to deliver in August, I said we can be ready to make order confirmations in Autumn; we are right now making the engineerization of the factory ( the production will be completely robotized to squeeze down the price as much as possible) and, even if we will be very good, the first deliveries will start perhaps within the year, but I cannot promise it; I can say that the price will be lower than expected and that it will be a revolution. We are making a tremendous work with top level Partners. Warm Regards, A.R. I wonder how difficult it is to set up a complete and fully robotized production facility for such a product. Of course the Ecat should be pretty simple, but does someone here have experience on how likely it is that this could happen until summer / autumn of this year? Perhaps they are reusing the production facilities from other partners? Wolf
