Renewable Energy – "Joe cell"

Steele Braden writes (and then followed up with an email):

Have any of you probed into the “Joe-cell” technology? Either this guy has produced somthing close to miracle technology, or he is an extremely clever hoaxer.

Steele, thanks for pinging me on this just now. Do you know, it’s funny, I’ve looked at your original comment several times but have never been able to make up my mind what to do with it. First, let me say that I am not an expert on the subject of wild, new ideas in science. As a garden-variety physics major of the 1970s, though, I’m more than conversant with the law of conservation of energy. Thus, I don’t see any sense in a claim that a certain technology “takes the energy out of water.” It takes WHAT energy out of water? If you had said, “We take the heat energy out of hot water, convert it to kinetic or electric energy, and leave you with cold water,” or “We take the potential energy of water in the mountains and leave you with water at sea level,” that would make sense. Or if you said, “We convert some of the mass from the elementary particles of which a water molecule is made into energy,” that would also make sense.

But there is no energy to be taken from the covalent bonds holding the atoms of a water molecule together, nor from the hydrogen bonds holding water molecules together. So, unless I’m missing something, this just seems to violate the most well-established laws of physics.

Having said that, I’d honestly love to discuss this with you. Please don’t hesitate to write or call. I’ll hope to hear from you. And, of course, I invite others to jump in here too.