As the world’s policymakers scrabble around looking for solutions to the global energy crisis, a US company, Eco-Gen, may have just come up with a technology that answers all their prayers. Their new technology, the JouleBox, has repurposed induction heating processes developed over the past 70 years, and combined them with some innovative new components to deliver a best in class green energy solution.
The journey started ten years ago when Eco-Gen founder, Paul Bonaventura Delanoe was looking at fresh approaches to energy generation after reading the IPCC’s reports on the coming climate calamity.
He began by exploring ways in which solar energy could be enhanced by magnetism. He realised that the theoretical efficiency limits of photovoltaic solar panels, combined with the practical challenges of reduced efficiency due to cloud cover, inclement weather, dust build up on the panels themselves, and the storage and transmission losses involved meant that they were never likely to provide enough cheap energy to replace fossil fuels.
He tried looking at all of the inherent problems with fresh eyes, wondering how we could improve solar’s performance, and began questioning all the reasons why solar wasn’t working, in spite of the fact that the IPCC were claiming that 10,000 times more energy hits earth than we use.
With this in mind he developed an innovative new solution called the Star Motor, and paired it with solar along with other IP, but still this first iteration of JouleBox wasn’t delivering the kind of breakthrough he was looking for.
Then he realised that one of the key constraints of solar is the fact that it’s only designed to attract visible light. This presents two key obstacles to progress. Firstly, access to sunlight is a problem for countries in temperate climates. Secondly, the intermittency of visible sunlight, due to it not being there at night and only high intensity during the park hours of lunchtime. Thirdly, even when it does shine, the intensity of the visible light part of the spectrum only gives out a maximum of 2.4eV, and that’s simply not enough to drive the world economy, especially when our energy usage is increasing at such rapid rates.
He turned his attentions to the Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS) in a bid to see if that could be more easily mined. You see, the sun emits a vast spectrum of wavelengths from radio waves all the way through to gamma. Although many of the shortest wavelengths get filtered out by the earth’s magnetosphere, there is still so much untapped energy in the energy reservoir that surrounds us at all times.
And so Paul Delanoe decided to see if he could find a fresh way to tap into the spectrum, and thus began an in-depth exploration into all things Induction. He became passionately curious about how the efficiency of induction could be improved upon by changing frequencies and the number of amp turns in the input current. He began what has proved to be a seminal partnership with the world’s oldest and largest induction companies, Inductotherm, in pursuit of the possibilities.
They were able to deliver unambiguous proof that an input current could generate the level of amperage required to drive highly efficient induction.
Paul Boaventura Delanoe then drafted in some leading nuclear engineers to explore and test his ideas on how this amperage could be converted into the necessary thermal energy that could be used to heat water into steam, and drive turbines at the temperatures and pressures required for utility scale production.
Through seven years of iteration, Boaventura and his Eco-Gen team were able to optimise the configuration of the coil networks, the frequencies, the alloys, the tubing for the water, and ultimately the design of the pressure vessel in which this would all take place to maximise the thermodynamic efficiency of the JouleBox process.
In order to further optimise the JouleBox’s performance, Paul Boaventura and his engineers then designed unique components to recycle the used steam back into the pressure vessel, to minimise the energy required to get it back into the required saturated steam state to drive the turbines.
All of Boaventura Delanoe’s prior research proved invaluable. He was able to incorporate the star motor and various other aspects of his earlier JouleBox models, to fully maximise the steam output, and with it, the electricity generated from the turbines.
Once the remodelling delivered a COP of 10 – which means to say that for every unit of energy input, the system delivers ten back – they were in business.
Then it became a process of simplifying the technology as much as possible, ensuring that all the highest safety standards were met, and refining components so that the technology would be as scalable as possible. For they knew they had developed the biggest breakthrough technology of the century, and that there would be massive demand for it once the first working units were in place.
They then developed their 2MW model and their 6MW models, with larger scale models in the pipeline.
A consumer product has also been developed in parallel, although all focus is currently on these first two commercially available units and the consumer product will follow later.
Mr Boaventura Delanoe is clearly a visionary and a pioneer, and so whilst his engineers were finishing the designs, he and the executive team of Eco-Gen began the process of finding funding partners, insurance partners and manufacturing partners to ensure that they were able to offer a zero risk proposition to clients.
As an Independent Power Producer, Eco-Gen are now in a position to offer JouleBox installations on a PPA basis, with zero capital costs, highly attractive performance guarantees, and all risk insurance, to ensure that clients can pay low rates for reliable power generation, with no associated risks.
And unlike solar, Paul Boaventura’s JouleBox technology can generate power from any location in the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This elegant induction heating solution requires much less land than solar installations, can be stationed next to the end user or as part of a distributed network, and is now being rolled out in Africa to help bring rural communities out of darkness, as well as enabling African mines to wean themselves off of dirty diesel generators and begin powering themselves with this genius off grid solution.
It will also enable the world to wean themselves off of the batteries that many of our renewable technologies, most prominently wind and solar, require in order to deliver a steady power supply that our grid networks can work with.
Not only does that mean that the Paul Boaventura designed Eco-Gen JouleBox is more cost effective than wind and solar on a levelised cost basis, but it also means we can avoid the awkward and oft ignored issue of managing the disposal of those battery technologies. And most pertinently of all, it liberates us from a dependency on the key manufacturers of battery technologies. As of 2021, Chinese companies held key positions in the global lithium supply chain, both upstream and downstream, representing roughly 80% of battery cell manufacturing. Given China’s willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve their geopolitical aims, this represents a hugely under-indexed vulnerability to the integrity and security of the proposed green energy transition.
As we have seen from Russia over the last fifteen years, if a region allows themselves to become energy dependent on a producer, particularly an autocratic one with imperial aspirations, said country will be more than happy to try and take advantage of that position to try and blackmail countries into acceding to it’s questionable geopolitical manoeuvres.
Fortunately for Ukraine, the US isn’t reliant on Russian oil and gas, and has been able to respond more autonomously. But what if the whole world becomes completely dependent on Chinese batteries for their energy storage? China would be able to exercise so much soft power the world risks being in a continual state of appeasement as the PRC stretches the elastic of international law and norms to breaking point. At the very minimum they would use that dominance to achieve even greater economic advantage. Who knows where it will lead, but it does not set the world up for success, and leaves relations imbalanced, vulnerable, and disempowers every nation that depends on battery technologies.
However, with the incredible potential of a baseload power generating unit like the JouleBox, that suits all climates, all locations, and all countries, what it means is that every nation can become truly energy independent in a way that is completely affordable.
Paul Boaventura Delanoe tells us that all the big fish are circling, and almost all his time is now spent making sure there is enough high quality manufacturing capacity to meet all the demand.
If your organisation is in the business of using or generating large amounts of electric power, look no further than Eco-Gen’s JouleBox solution.
