BlackLight Power lands first license agreement for electricity from … water?

BlackLight Power, one of the more outlandish cleantech companies VentureBeat has covered, claims to have developed a way to generate 200 times more energy than coal using only water. To do so, BlackLight says it lowers the energy level of hydrogen atoms below ground state — something most scientists have deemed impossible. For this reason, many have speculated that BLP’s process is nothing more than an elaborate hoax. But today’s announcement of an inaugural licensing agreement with Estacado Energy Services to generate power in New Mexico could change their minds.

Estacado, a subsidiary of the Roosevelt County Electric Cooperative, struck the non-exclusive deal for BLP to produce both electric and thermal energy to help keep the lights on for eight cities spread over the east central part of the state. This licensing agreement is the first of what New Jersey-based BLP hopes will be many to come, according to its product roadmap.

Does this prove definitively that BLP is the genuine article? It sounds pessimistic to say it remains to be seen, but the process is still highly controversial. On one hand, the company has a team of qualified physicists of its own that say it works beyond a doubt — not to mention $60 million in venture backing and some outside endorsements. On the other, it has been widely neglected by the scientific mainstream since its inception in 1991, which seems fishy considering it could represent the biggest energy breakthrough in recent history.

Last time we covered BLP, it had just received outside verification from a team of engineers at Rowan University. Well, make that tenuous verification. Reportedly, the process only gave off a quick burst of heat. At the time, founder Randell Mills said the mechanism for looping the reaction is still being kept secret within the company. Suspicious, but not a deal breaker. Mills says independent approval of its full 50-kW reactor will come within a year.

For more on the process, the controversy and the Rowan University test, see past coverage by VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison.

Most of BLP’s investors are undisclosed, but it did received $10 million from electric utilities Conectiv and Pacificorp, as well as high-profile members of its own board like Shelby Brewer, assistant secretary of nuclear energy under Reagan, and Michael Jordan, chief executive of Electronic Data Systems.

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About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

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  • Mack
    I know physicists don't give this one much of a chance but there is a lot of evidence behind the claims of this company. The thermal power claims are only one aspect. There is the collection and identification of hydrinos and compounds by NMR and TOF-SIMS. There is their molecular modelling software Millsian that can accurately model large chemical compounds on a PC- something no QM software can do. And the theory solves outstanding problems in physics: dark matter is these hydrinos and molecular hydrinos that don't absorb or emit light in the same way as hydrogen; the sun's corona is powered by hydrino transitions that are the source of UV photons (hence the name Blacklight power) and massive temperature difference between the sun's surface and the corona.

    There has been too little investigation of the evidence for his claims. Too many physicists have taken the approach that it differs from what we were taught so it is wrong. While BLP and Mills have written and submitted hundreds of papers, there is almost no papers attempting to replicate the evidence to prove him right or wrong. Attacks on BLP are based on assertion instead of evidence.

    From everything I have read, I think he is right. That said I want large numbers of physicists to publicly test their claims. If the Uncertainty Principle as a basis for hydrogen ground state stability has to be tossed out then so be it.

    Who wouldn't prefer the triumph of a GUT based on classical physics, reinstating cause and effect in the macro and microscopic worlds?
  • It is interesting, now that they have taken funding and have a large scale deal in place; if they are lying the chances that the SEC and state securities enforcement divisions will be calling for jail time is rather large. I know that the California Department of Corporations Enforcement Division would love to get its hands on a corporation that lied to its investors in order to secure funding.

    That being said, it is hard to hood wink $60 million out of smart people.

    This waiting for "real" or "fraud" is going to end up killing me!!!

    Thoughts from the inpatient,

    Michael Kassing
    MarkTend.com (not producing power but definitely producing entropy!!)
  • Anonymous
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randell_Mills

    Ha. 50,000 watts as a claim means nothing in itself, as power is just a rate of energy production. 50,000 watts generated for a microsecond won't even light a match. Let's see them produce 50,000 watt-hours over the course of one hour.

    Anyone can manipulate a strange machine with strong chemicals like the NaH agent cited on the Blackwater website to produce a brief energy burst (recall cold fusion) -- producing sustained energy output is the key to disputing any claims of fraud. When they do that, then the world's energy problems will be solved and the millennium will come.

    But don't wait for it underwater. And don't bet the farm.
  • Neil Ferguson
    Try actually studying the claims. Rowan University's experiment produced 1 MJ. That's energy. It occurred over about a 20 second interval. That's about 50 kW average for 20 seconds. The inventors say that the industrial process for utility scale energy production has been proven in their labs. You may be right. It could all be a mirage. But get your facts right.
  • KA
    How can you have customers to trust you with a logo like that? It's like the devil's looking at you, scary.
  • "...it has been widely neglected by the scientific mainstream since its inception in 1991, which seems fishy considering it could represent the biggest energy breakthrough in recent history." ...article.

    What is "fishy" is the widespread condemnation by the scientific "community". It is reminiscent of the Catholic Church's attitude to anything that challenges its world-view, and the arguing from "law" to "experience" is essentially no different whether the laws being invoked be the "laws of physics" or "the laws of God": it is still top-down patriarchal thinking. When science was on the defensive in the struggle between patriarchy and matriarchy it was about inquiring into experience, delving into the mystery of nature, and about the journey of understanding of reality itself through seeing, not through the imposition of preconception through the blind prejudice of faith! This is what we have now - a scientific "community" that resembles a religious "community". I would have thought that scientists, true scientists, would have been inspired, not casting judgements as religious fundamentalists.

    Fundamentalism is literal interpretation from books, and it is what I am seeing in this world-shattering new paradigm of physics which will change the world in ways that are hardly even imaginable, so what we have as the sun rises on the 21st Century is not scientific freedom but "scientific fundamentalism".

    With Blacklight Power we are witnessing, in my estimation, real world-change which will, in turn, help to challenge patriarchal science and patriarchal society by helping to lay open the falsehood, the false underlying anti-reality, upon which patriarchal anti-society is founded. If the very foundations of human existence on this planet are false, and they are brought into question and exposed as false, then just as quickly as this radically new technology changes the world the paradigm shift that may accompany it, if it is not ruthlessly suppressed, will change the way we see the world and change the way we think of who we are. Much to the chagrin of patriarchal die-hards, it will be liberating.

    What BlackLight Power represents, to me, is the emergence of a new paradigm shift in science, which may be called "dark science", because it is matriarchal rather than patriarchal science, which, conversely, might be called "light science". It is about whether the male principle precedes the female principle or whether the female principle precedes the male principle. This is the difference between patriarchy and matriarchy. Albert Einstein, whom some have compared to Randy Mills, maintained this, in his own way such as when he said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge!"

    http://www.examiner.com/x-1528-Baltimore-Person...

    [Albert Einstein pictured sticking his tongue out]

    (But remember he said, he owed it all to his first wife, Rosa! How many discoveries and how much imagination attributed to men has only been attributed to men because women were not permitted to speak, to be "qualified" to speak, to be "authorised" to read by patriarchal society. So when in history men, as now, with Randy Mills, have been censored and condemned by patriarchal "authorities", consider how much more so have women and girls been silenced and obliterated from history by patriarchal male authority, based on entrenched social power, falsehood and prejudice.)

    The matrix, and that way of thinking which is matriarchal, has been suppressed under patriarchy, but when that suppression is gone and imagination is unleashed, science will progress much further than now. It is interesting, that even with more heavily engineered 1950's silicon chip technology than existed in the 1960's, NASA has just announced that it hopes to have a moon-rocket in 12 years time, in 2020, and it will be called after the god of war, the Ares V. But the Saturn V moon-rocket was built in 1967, just a few years after John F. Kennedy announced that the United States will go to the moon ... and "do the hard things" ... and that was the first time that the realization of such a dream had ever been attempted. Is this not enough evidence in itself that science has gone backwards and that the rate of discovery is, especially considering and that the population of the world is now more than twice than that which it was in the 1960's and that it has been done before, is abysmally slow? And considering that patriarchy is inherently opposed to imagination, intuition, discovery, creativity, individuality and freedom and instead imposes form, dogma, tyranny and conservatism, is this not evidence that science and society are in a new "Dark Age" ( which is a mislogism as it should be called a "Light Age" because it is based upon the precedence of the male principle).

    As for the need for some secretiveness until now...

    "At the time, founder Randell Mills said the mechanism for looping the reaction is still being kept secret within the company. Suspicious, but not a deal breaker." ...article.

    ... since BlackLight Power has been involved in legal problems in trying to obtain patents:

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/r...

    http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=71258

    The legal objections by the patent office are themselves based upon scientific fundmentalism over experience. The idea that this technology could have no industrial application because it breaks "the laws of physics" is, again, like the Catholic Church refusing to allow Galileo to publish a book that said that the Earth revolved around the sun because it breaks "the laws of God". What is the difference? Both have put law and dogma before experience, both do so on the basis of a fundamental falsehood, a flaw in human thinking that has persisted for thousands of years and which has spread like a cancererous tumour.

    Elizabeth Jane
    Broadview SA

    matriarchyVnow

    http://pressroom.prlog.org/eLiza1/
    http://SwordofXena.blogspot.com
  • Chuck Kottke
    One has only to recount Galileo's assertion that he had the right ideas about what caused the tides in the ocean to know that anyone, even Galileo, can have wrong ideas! Here, it's a good idea to look at it from an unbiased, scientific perspective. I tend to be skeptical because of the history of energy generating falsehoods of the past, but I'm willing to consider the possibility that it just might work. Still, all the enormous effort poured into generating energy makes me wonder - have we been missing the boat? Energy efficiency has incredibly enormous gains to be had at comparatively little expense, with improvements in comfort and reliability to boot! There's where the easy pickings are.
  • mike
    great back and forth debate here. I especially like the comparison of the Scientific community to the Catholic Church for prejudicial judgement - go that right! The claims of Mr. Mills are so outrageous that they deserve widespread debunking - like cold fusion got - or....perhaps....replication! If Mr. Mills, (who wants to be the Bill Gates of this energy source, and therefore guards the essential steps to the process) is right he deserves everything he can get out of it; and if he is wrong...he will deserve everything he gets.
  • Conrad
    Some interesting comments. Looks like we have an interested crowd. I was a skeptic to all of this stuff 15 years ago when someone introduced me to COLD FUSION Magazine. In that first issue, there was a reference to Randall Mills. More was written in following publications. Mills' work has been verified relentlessly going back for years. Here's an excerpt from Infinite Energy Magazine. I'm sorry I have no date for this at the moment (It was taken from http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/samp...

    "Mills founded Hydrocatalysis Corporation near Lancaster,
    Pennsylvania. He entered into a contract with Thermacore to
    build and test cells based on his theories. He also subcontracted
    work to Penn State University and to Lehigh University for
    measurements of reaction products in his cells, particularly evidence
    for hydrinos. He has followed a pattern of subcontracting
    work to selected university and commercial laboratories to
    good advantage. The cost of recruiting people and establishing
    a laboratory was avoided. Further, since the work was done by
    independent laboratories, their reports gave a growing credibility
    to the theoretical projections of Mills’ theory."