BlackLight Power claims novel energy source
BlackLight Power, a company that claims to draw energy from a disputed form of hydrogen, said on Thursday that it has licensed its technology to a customer.
New Jersey-based BlackLight Power said a subsidiary of a small New Mexico utility, Roosevelt County Electric Cooperative, has licensed its technology and the rights to buy its heat-generating equipment.
The company's claims have caused controversy because they challenge long-held notions in physics. It's an example of how the surge in interest in energy technology has revived older technologies, like solar thermal, and inspired scientists to develop disruptive technologies.
It's not easy for an outsider to assess the merits of the company's technology, but it appears BlackLight Power is being taken seriously by some people.
BlackLight Power has raised $60 million in funding and the company is in discussions with utilities to use its equipment, according to CEO and founder Randell Mills said. It employs 25 people, about half of which are PhDs. Its process has been peer-reviewed, Mills said, and the company has created a prototype 5 kilowatt machine.
Mills said that the he has found a way to alter the state of stable hydrogen atoms in a new form, called hydrinos, and tap into the energy released during that change.
The company has developed a reactor that uses a solid fuel--a form of nickel called Raney nickel--that starts a chemical reaction that brings a hydrogen's electron closer its nucleus, releasing energy, he explained.
A small company is making controversial claims about its process for making thermal energy by altering the state of hydrogen atoms in water through a chemical reaction. Here's a diagram of how its technology would be used to make electricity with a steam turbine.
(Credit: BlackLight Power)Its business plan is to sell license its equipment broadly and have it sold to utilities. These utilities would use an electrolyzer to split the hydrogen from water and create a burst of thermal energy through the chemical reaction its equipment starts.
That heat, which power generators now produce by burning natural gas or coal, can be used to make electricity in a far more efficient manner and without fossil fuels, he said. About one liter of water is used per hour and the hydrogen can be recouped during the process to be used again, he said.
VentureBeat has written about BlackLight a few times now and offers a more detailed technical explanation.
In comments on articles about the company, many people dispute BlackLight Power's claims. The Wikipedia entry on "hydrino theory" has a section devoted to the controversy around it and Miles' claims, which he's quick to defend.
"They're arguing a theoretical argument. We can show experimentally that we can create this new form of energy," he said. "We're not in academic discussions anymore. We've moved beyond that."
No doubt, the company will continue to have its detractors. In the meantime, we await to see whether other utility and industrial customers are willing to vet and take a chance on the company's technology.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
Why has this "perpetual motion" garbage been given space on CNET?
This is nothing more than a scam looking for a few suckers.
Yeah .... OK .... just trust us.
They have moved beyond providing any actual scientific proof because it does not exist.
Quantum electrodynamics has been verified to an amazing degree of accuracy. Hydrogen is simple enough that the possible states of H atoms must have been well known for a long time. We can solve those equations for fairly complex molecules. If pure hydrogen had lower energy states than H2, we would know it. Besides, it would have to be low enough to recoup the energy used to split H2O.
It's amazing that somebody invested $60M on this (if they really did). It must be either the same people who bought CDOs based on zero-down, variable interest loans, or religious fundamentalists who have no problems dismissing science that they don't like.
Perhaps you should read more news from outside the mainstream media.
If they have proven their power source to work through direct experimentation, and had it -independantly- verified through experimentation, who really cares if the consensus theory scientists, can explain explain it, or how much they say theory says its not possible. When you prove something violates theory, with real experimentation, and accurate measurements, you have to reassess the theory, thats why it is called a theory instead of a fact.
"Quantum electrodynamics has been verified to an amazing degree of accuracy" yet introduced the uncertainty principle (which I am not disputing).
Quantum electrodynamics can not even explain the existance of a point charge, only how they interact. Ask your self this: As you expend a great deal of energy repeatably beating your head against the wall, that wall somehow comes up with precisely enough energy to resist your beating every time. Where does a wall get that energy, and why does it not dissipate or deplete over time with your continuous head beating?
Documentary Video of Rowan University Validation
Cranbury, NJ, USA ? BlackLight Power Inc. (BLP) today announced the successful independent replication and validation of its 1,000 watt and 50,000 watt reactors based on its proprietary new clean energy technology.
BLP's 50,000 watt reactor generated over 1 million joules of energy in a precise measurement made by Rowan University engineers, led by Dr. Peter Jansson. The independent study included full characterization of a proprietary solid fuel to generate the energy before and after the reaction.
BLP has been conducting experiments on the heat generation from materials that demonstrate what they believe is a process capable of relaxing the hydrogen atom below its normally considered ground state. For some time now, teams of engineering professors and their students at Rowan University have been involved in validating in their own campus laboratory facilities many of the heat experiments performed by BLP.
People have 'made' lots of energy from hydrogen fuel cells, but it always takes more energy to create the hydrogen, than the energy you get out of the fuel cell; i.e., a fuel cell doesn't make enough electricity to make the hydrogen that it needs to keep running.
How about this system? It includes 'Recycle Spent Solid Fuels' and 'H2 Gas Recycle'. Has it been demonstrated that the power produced is greater than the recycling power required?
The people who've backed this obviously haven't heard about Mills' gross mathematical errors in his "The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics" from which he bases his Hydrino theory.
Like I said before, unless he agrees to full disclosure by his peers, this is just nonsense.
Of course, if they just bury (or burn) the "waste" (whatever product the chemistry produces) and buy fresh "fuel" from a supplier, then they would actually have a net energy production (ignoring the energy involved in disposing of "spent fuel" and the energy needed for the supplier to produce more fresh fuel and deliver it to the plant).
Really, if you wanted to capture all the carbon dioxide released from a coal-burning plant, you could also recycle that back to carbon, but once again, even if you had an impossibly perfect process you still end up using the same amount of energy you produce (in reality it would take more energy). No net gain in energy, no power to the consumer, no money to the company.
It is a matter of economics. Plants of long ago were free, sunlight energy was free and trapped in that oil, and the bowel of the earth?s energy was free. The only cost to us is mining the oil, transporting, refining, and delivering that to the end user. As long as the oil companies can make a profit from oil, given that there are really no serious alternative at given selling price of oil products, then we will have demand for oil. Energy efficiency be damned!
It is the same way with most energy technologies. If the cost of production is cheaper than the sale price of the desired energy, it becomes viable. It really doesn't matter how much energy was spent to produce the desired form of energy that we use. What matters is if it will be profitable, given the current competitive markets.
And still just the same, you will always use more energy than the value of the converted energy. What matters is that if your source energy is far cheaper than the desired converted energy so that you will have profit. Source energy that are cheap, as in almost free, are from the Sun, which primarily the source of major energy processes of entire global ecosystems, our climate and other global energy transformation processes. The water that powers the hydroelectric dams, and the winds, and the waves of the oceans, and the underwater currents, all the biofuels... they all can be tied to the power of the sun. The other possible cheap energy sources are from the bowels of the earth, and the tides caused by the moon and the sun. While these energy sources are free, harnessing and converting them is not. But, if you calculate any of the energy conversion processes in all of these, the energy losses are tremendous, you always start more than what you get. Economics at play, hand in hand with energy conversions.
It is the current state of economics why we are addicted to oil. Once we realize how oil and fossil fuels are ruining this planet, we will be able to account these damages as the cost that all of us are forced to pay, one way or another. With the oil's hidden environmental costs now exposed and whose global cataclysmic effects priced accordingly, it won't become viable and hopefully we drop it and go with the safer alternatives that would become cheaper in our speculations.
And this Blacklight Power Claim, it really doesn't matter if you use one million times more energy than what you end up with. It matters only if the price of the converted energy is far greater than the cost of energy used, and that is what the investors care about. If it is an environmentally safer method, so much the better, otherwise, forget it.
Wait... dihydrino is not stable? It spontaneously turns itself into regular matter? Cool! I never thought that conservation of mass/energy was such a hot idea anyway, even if time-invariance of physical laws implies it, so what.
Luigi where exactly did you come up with the "probably nasty, toxic stuff." and "Wait... dihydrino is not stable?" comments which clearly indicate a contrarian mindset. It would take maybe an hour or two of research to find out that the (alleged) dihydrino is extremely stable and non toxic as one would expect from a lowered energy state h2 molecule.
Intelligent debate is helpful, saying out of hand that this will fail or it is the savior of our society is a clear indication of a rigid mind.
Alexi
Many of the posts here are a great example of how science has become a religion. Anyone who dares go against the accepted doctrines must be a "con artist working a scam." At least there are a few scientist willing to risk the wrath of the scientific priesthood. Rowan University's engineering school was one. -- Do the naysayers on this thread think that the scientist at Rowan can't run a simple calorimetry test?
Dr. Randy Booker, chair of the physics department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, flew to New Jersey to investigate BlackLight's claims. Booker says he was skeptical at the outset, but during his visit, "I found that they really were producing a great deal of excess energy with hydrogen," he says. "Some people may disagree with the theory, but the experiments work." http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/01/smallbusiness/blacklight.fsb/index.htm
From: THE WRIGHT BROTHERS, by Fred C. Kelly:
"When a man of the profound scientific wisdom of Simon Newcomb (for example) had demonstrated with unassailable logic why man couldn't fly, why should the public be fooled by silly stories about two obscure bicycle repairmen who hadn't even been to college. Professor Newcomb was so distinguished an astronomer that he was the only American since Benjamin Franklin to be made an associate of the Institute of France. It was widely assumed that what he didn't know about the laws of physics simply wasn't in books. And that when he said that flying couldn't be done, there was no need to inquire any further."
In response to michaelmcdnzl and supposing this hydrino theory is true. Suspension of disbelief. A lower energy state of hydrogen should react in a way opposite of high energy state hydrogen. High energy hydrogen will emit photons and transfer energy to things that it might interact with, imparting momentum, mechanical energy and therefore heat to those of a relatively lower energy state. So a lower energy state of hydrogen would then absorb energy from those it comes into contact with (that contain a relatively higher energy state (which should be nearly everything)). In theory. It would absorb photons (clearly) and (possibly) mechanical (heat) energy wen it comes into contact with other matter ? Sounds fascinating... we'll see.
- by EveryAngle January 26, 2009 2:58 AM PST
- I know very little about Classical Quantum Mechanics, but I do know politics, and cheap almost free energy is bad for The Richest Men in the World, I'm talking about the Energy Giants. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is the Richest man in Europe, he controls whether or not Europeans get Natuarl Gas to heat the homes in Europes nototriously cold winters. Men as rich and powerful as this, will spend billions to stop new sources of cheap enegry from prospering. They do not want to lose their golden goose.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(20 Comments)