Spoiler alert: NOPE.
Italian "inventor" Andrea Rossi is making big waves this week with reports that his E-Cat invention has been demonstrated for "private corporate interests" who were apparently satisfied that the device did indeed produce free energy as promised.
Color me unsurprised.
What would surprise me is if the E-Cat had been shown to, you know, scientists. People who have some kind of background or training which qualifies them to determine whether or not a magic black box is producing energy out of thin air without any unpleasant side effects. The fact that the corporate investors were unnamed only makes the whole thing more likely to be a scam.
Metafilter user Slap*Happy has a great summary of how this scam works in his comment here. The con is called "salting," and in this case the reported results could easily be obtained by simply putting a battery inside the mystical box.
We have a box that Rossi won't let anyone open, reports that some anonymous people agree that it is really cold fusion, and a pile of used nickel powder which Rossi says is the end result of his cold fusion process, but which is indistinguishable from a pile of regular old used nickel powder.
Worse still, Rossi has a terrible track record. In the words of this astute commenter to the National Review, he has "a history of questionable behavior" which includes being jailed for tax fraud, a track record of making "grandiose claims" and never following through, and he has created a fake scientific journal which (unsurprisingly) backs up his results.
Cold fusion or "zero point energy" is the dream of the future, and has been for decades. Imagine being able to get all the energy you need, for free, without any environmental consequences. No nuclear meltdowns, no coal mining, no more oil spills, no more pollution.
Unfortunately, given the laws of physics as we understand them today, it simply isn't possible. But that hasn't kept a lot of people from trying, bless their hearts. Most zero point energy enthusiasts are simply deluded (or irrationally optimistic). But Andrea Rossi seems to be deliberately committing fraud in order to scam people, which is pretty heinous.
I'm not completely unwilling to believe in cold fusion. It would sure be great if we had it. But at this point, given the long history of zero point energy scams, it definitely falls under the heading of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."