Blog: Announcing the New Energy World Symposium

Today, I’m announcing that the New Energy World Symposium will hold its first session in Stockholm, Sweden, on June 21, 2016. [UPDATE: The initial plans for the symposium in 2016 were canceled and the symposium is now planned for June 18-19, 2018].

The Symposium will focus on the disruptive consequences of a new energy source that may literally change the world, promising Planet Earth clean water, zero-emission vehicles with unlimited mileage, a solution to the climate crisis and much more*.

I’m particularly proud to announce a few of the renowned speakers who together with me believe that it’s high time to draw global attention to this subject.

As a science and technology journalist I started to follow this field many years ago, intensifying my coverage in 2011 when an important breakthrough was claimed by the Italian inventor Andrea Rossi.

What has frustrated me intensely since then has been the stubborn resistance from the scientific community and from leading scientific journals and other media even to look at the massive evidence for the physical phenomenon behind the technology, often called LENR or cold fusion, simply because it’s considered to be ‘impossible’ and that it violates known laws of nuclear physics.

I have also been amazed at the openly aggressive criticism being expressed by many opponents, against anyone arguing for the importance and for the validity of this field.

After all, it’s a research field that requires minimal resources yet offers a possible solution for a series of fundamental global problems, furthermore potentially opening completely new horizons in science and technology. Why on Earth shouldn’t we give it a chance?

Huw Price, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, has called the stigma suffered by cold fusion a reputation trap. Meanwhile it has been scientifically proven that elite scientists really can hold back scientific progress. Or, as Nobel Laureate Max Planck put it: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Now, finally, the time has come to challenge the resistance and to bring this discussion to a broader audience than those hundreds or, in the last few years, ten thousand people around the world, who have insisted in maintaining an interest in the advances of the field.

The reason is that several attempts at developing a commercially viable technology based on the phenomenon are showing significant progress.

One of the most promising is an ongoing one-year test of a heat plant producing one megawatt of thermal power—the average consumption of about 300 Western households, including electricity, space heating, water heating and air conditioning—from mere grams of harmless fuel.

Commercial products based on such technology would turn the energy industry upside down and fundamentally change and improve the operations and efficiency of several other key industries. Yet the technology is only in its cradle.

The one-year test is being undertaken by the aforementioned Italian inventor Andrea Rossi and his US industrial partner Industrial Heat, and should be concluded in March 2016. The results should be released shortly afterwards, controlled by a third-party certifying institute based on scrupulous peer review.

Since I have covered the development of Rossi’s energy device, the E-Cat, I know that there are good reasons to believe that the technology is valid and that positive testimonials from the ongoing test, that I have received, are true.

When the results are presented I will report on them and, if they are clearly positive, the final decision to arrange the symposium will be taken and registration will open immediately afterwards, probably at the end of March 2016.

Today, you will be able to pre-register for the symposium without fees. Those who pre-register will receive a one-week opportunity to get a 10-percent discount on the attendance fee when full registration opens in March 2016 (pre-register here).

Initially, attendees will be limited to 500, which could possibly be adjusted upwards if interest for the symposium turns out to be significantly larger, since this would require a larger venue.

You can follow current news coverage on progress in this field on the website E-Cat World, which is one of the partners of the symposium. Two more partners that I’m proud to present are the future-focused Swedish research and management consulting firm Kairos Future, and the London based global non-profit Network Society Research Ltd.

The opportunity for interesting talks, discussions and meetings that New Energy World Symposium can bring is genuinely exciting, and I look forward to seeing you among the attendees—the first ever to prepare for the radical changes that energy disruption will bring.

§

* The main conference on the scientific aspects of LENR, the physical phenomenon behind the energy source, is ICCF, which will hold its 20th session on October 2-7, 2016, in Sendai, Japan.

 

Photo: Staffan Eliasson/mediabank.visitstockholm.com