ROME: An investment fund focused on low-energy nuclear reaction technologies, or LENR, has invested in an alternative energy technology business based in Milan, Italy.
LENR-Invest in Grand Rapids said this week that it has invested in NichEnergy Srl.
The fund said NichEnergy has a proprietary process for producing energy from a nickel-hydrogen reaction that’s protected by two European Union-issued patents.
The deal also gives LENR-Invest access to Francesco Piantelli, an “esteemed” professor who founded NichEnergy in 2011.
We formed LENR-Invest to not just provide needed capital for early stage LENR firms, but also to provide the new ideas and technologies,” said Dr. Antoine Guillemin, senior partner and co-founder, LENR-Invest.
NichEnergy’s pioneering work with hydrogen and nickel can catalyze the efforts of our portfolio and shorten the timeframe for LENR technology to cross the threshold of promise to commercially viable energy generation.”
Valerio Ciampoli, head of international relationships at NichEnergy, said the company plans to “leverage the investment to further develop our technology and intellectual property.”
Invest is an investment fund “solely focused on helping early stage companies commercialize LENR technologies.”
LENR is the term applied to the phenomenon of sustained, anomalous heat created when certain metals are combined with hydrogen, called metal hydrides, according to the fund. The produced energy — heat — in excess of what chemical properties dictate “suggests the source is a nuclear force that binds particles together.”
LENR-Invest said liberating this binding energy without the harmful emissions or residue of traditional nuclear reactions creates the “potential for a safe, secure, sustained and very low-cost energy source.”
