President Obama’s reelection could give low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) a pretty big boost. The President has quietly laid out a pretty radical new energy policy that has received very little attention. This energy policy seems designed to harness next generation resources such as LENR or cold fusion.

An executive order signed by Obama on August 30 commits the federal government to implementing something called Combined Heat and Power (CHP). Under CHP industrial facilities would generate their own electricity as well as heat. Industry would generate a lot of its own power rather than draw it off the grid. That’s obviously a paradigm shift in the way America generates electricity and a radical about face for Obama’s energy strategy.

The CHP strategy outlined in the executive order sounds a lot like the LENR devices proposed by Andrea Rossi and Francesco Celani doesn’t it. It would be perfect for the hot ecat proposed by Andrea Rossi, the Brillouin boiler technology or the Celani LENR technology that Kressen proposes to utilize to power and heat data centers.

Interestingly enough the CHP plan laid out in the executive order sets forth a national goal of deploying 40 gigawatts of new industrial CHP in the United States by 2020. This is a lot of electricity by the way a gigawatt is equal to one billion watts of electricity or one 1,000 megawatts. The United States generated around 1,138.6 gigawatts of electricity in 2010 so it is still a small percentage but an impressive one.

 

How could the White House hope to achieve this goal unless somebody there thinks that they have some sort of new energy source available? Could it be LENR, after all NASA has revealed its cold fusion research? Perhaps the President thinks that such an energy source is around the corner.

This executive order raises some intriguing questions and it also indicates a very different energy strategy than the one Obama had previously been pursuing. Perhaps the administration has abandoned its commitment to green energy technology after being burned in the Solyndra scandal? Or maybe something has changed its mind. It also seems to indicate that the White House might be abandoning its plant for a smart electrical grid.

The US Energy Department seems to have developed an open mind about LENR after years of ignoring it. The Defense Intelligence Agency has also put out reports on LENR, which the President may have read. Perhaps the White House has been convinced that there’s something better than solar panels and wind mills on the horizon.

So it looks like we have a new energy policy even if we don’t have a new President. This energy policy might be friendlier to LENR but it isn’t the law of the land. Laws and policies in the United States are ultimately set by Congress which controls the budget not by the President. Executive orders from the President are more like suggestions of policy rather than actual policies.

It is hard to see what the Congress will do on energy or on LENR this year because it is deadlocked. The Democrats control the Senate and the Republicans the house. There seems to be little interest in LENR in both parties. The one Senate candidate with an interest in it Bob Kerrey lost his race in Nebraska.

Still it appears that the Obama administration is changing direction on energy policy moving away from green technology and instead attempting to increase production. If true that means there will be more interest in new power sources like cold fusion in Washington. Whether this change is motivated by political reasons or the recognition that a new energy source is almost here remains to be seen.