At 09:39 AM 8/23/2012, Andre Blum wrote:
Rossi's attempt to scale up did not fail, too.
We don't know that. Generally, in his post, Mr. Blum made a number of statements, as if they were fact, that are not from independent sources. Like the claim that the 1 MW E-cat is "industrially certified." By what agency? Where is the evidence of that? While preliminary certifications may be secret (I think), to be useful in actual commercial practice, they must be verifiable.
(And a safety certification may be completely irrelevant to actual function. Something that absolutely doesn't work might get a safety certification.)
It is a pretty sound, safe and useful idea to scale up energy devices by running my of them in parallel.
That's a way of creating a larger application, but it assumes, to be sane, the existence of smaller devices that are at least statistically reliable. To delay the release of valuable smaller devices, in order to first build something scaled-up, is insane.
If you have the smaller products, you could immediately sell them, at higher markup than the larger device.
This idea helped him to (1) lend more credibility to his invention;
That failed. Rossi has very low credibility. Only among "believers," people who are willing to believe Rossi's claims without having adequate evidence, are his pronouncements accepted, any more. He had higher credibility at the first announcements, until the details of his demonstrations came out, and until it became known how actively he was resisting even supervised testing by people like Jed.
Jed was, and might remain, a "believer" that Rossi has found something, but at the same time, he's been totally discouraged by Rossi's behavior. If Rossi wanted that, he got what he wanted. If he wanted to look like a con artist, he succeeded brilliantly. So now he lives with the consequences of his own business plan. That's fair. He created it.
Rossi is not the "victim" of some vast conspiracy to suppress his technology. It can be credibly claimed that he was some kind of victim in the past, with Petrolgragon. But Rossi had plenty of opportunity to gain wide support, and rejected it.
None of this means that he doesn't have anything real. He might. But he has arranged things so that only a fool is likely to investigate seriously. Maybe he wants exactly that. However, it means that he created a fool magnet, as we've seen many times, from people who have less information than someone like Jed.
(Jed has confidential information, he's said many times. The problem with that is that Jed, while very knowledgeable, is not infallible -- nor would he claim to be. There is public information, such as the K&E testing, that, conveyed privately, might look really solid, but that was later seen to be seriously flawed. It is terribly easy to get it wrong, and if the inventor is managing things, the risks get even worse. Inventor lifts the output hose in the middle and works that toward the drain, then pulls the hose from the drain, and shows steam coming out the end. See? No water, just steam. But if one really thinks about that, why did the inventor walk that hose the way he did? It's obvious. To remove water that he knew from experience would be there, so it wouldn't blow out on people. Now, was that water from condensation of pure steam, or was it overflow water, thus blowing the calorimetry out of the ... water? From the claimed steam generation rates, the steam shown was seriously wimpy, as many later pointed out. The appearance is then strong: the test shown was not generating much steam, and *might* be overflowing with unboiled water. While the inventor claimed it was generating steam and wasn't mentioning overflow as a possibility. And then it got worse....)
(2) come up with a useful product for the market which can be tapped soonest, because of lighter certification requirements.
Nonsense. He could sell small devices that are industrially certified, more easily and more quickly and in high volume. Indeed, that certification would probably apply automatically to the larger assembly. He could simply sell someone a pile of smaller devices, with instructions to assemble them, or, alternative, he could offer the thing assembled.
As Jed pointed out, he'd buy a small E-cat, almost certainly, but without having his hands on one to test first, he would never consider buying a megawatt worth.
