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Energy-from-nothing device fails to move
CBC News
An Irish company that claims to have overthrown a key law of physics with an energy-from-nothing device cancelled a demonstration on Thursday, citing “technical difficulties.”
Steorn, a Dublin-based technology development company, said its Orbo “free energy technology” had managed to thwart the principle of the conservation of energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
The company planned to demonstrate the technology using a self-rotating wheel at the Kinetica Museum gallery in London on Thursday, as well as streaming video of the demonstration through its website.
Instead, a note on the website said “intense heat from the camera lighting” had caused problems with the demonstration and Kinetica would not be open Thursday. Steorn also said the demonstration could be viewed online, but the link led to the announcement about the problem. Following the link to four cameras monitoring the wheel showed no movement by late Thursday.
The company said on its website that Orbo uses “magnetic field interaction” to produce “free, clean and constant energy.” It said “free” means it doesn’t use an external energy source; “clean” means there are no emissions; and “constant” means that, barring mechanical failure, Orbo will run indefinitely.
“The law of conservation of energy has been very reliable for 300 years, however it’s missing one variable from the equation, and that’s time,” CEO Sean McCarthy told SiliconRepublic.com.
(5 July 2007)
Perpetual commotion
Huckster or genius? An Irish firm is the latest to trumpet a perpetual-motion machine
Sarah Barmak, The Star
“Built to last.”
“Lasts an extra, extra long time.”
“It keeps going, and going, and going, and going …”
Sure, that’s what they all say. But be it batteries or bubblegum, everything stops sometime. The only thing that goes on forever is the propensity to make this stuff up.
Perhaps this is what observers of Irish company Steorn are thinking these days. Nearly a year has elapsed since the firm put an ad in The Economist announcing that it had accomplished the impossible: developed a machine that would never stop running, producing unlimited clean power forever.
In other words, it declared it had solved the world’s energy crisis in one stroke. Steorn had entered a province traditionally populated by hoodwinking fraudsters and talentless tinkers alike: the perpetual-motion machine.
Like the fountain of youth, perpetual motion is a collective dream, an inventor’s fable that has drawn ardent believers through the centuries. Unlike alchemy, however, it happens to be one mythic riddle that hundreds still attempt to solve. ..
(8 July 2007)
Interesting sprint through the history of ‘heavenly wheel’ perpetual motion machines. See The car that ran on water for a sympathetic treatment of the work of Stanley Allen Meyer.
Energy Investors Take Note: The Second Law of Thermodynamics Still Applies
Rob Day, Seeking Alpha via Yahoo
With the recent rise in interest in alternative energy technologies and other breakthrough clean technologies has come the inevitable rise in questionable business ideas promising unbelievable benefits: “free” energy, “free” electricity, etc. Let’s just call these the “Huh” companies — they typically invite people to sign up to be an early customer for free (just, hey, you will need to write a big deposit check, but you know, you’ll get that back, no worries…), so what’s not to like?
Any venture capital financing deal is typically the result of a very thorough diligence process, where any business model or technology that can’t withstand deep scrutiny will not pass muster. And VCs are by nature pretty jaded on all this kind of wild-eyed stuff. So the “Huh” companies typically don’t get venture funding, and cleantech VCs don’t pay much mind to them. But as the cleantech sector grows, VCs are going to need to be concerned about the “Huh” companies, simply because when they inevitably implode it can have negative impacts on the overall market acceptance of related, serious approaches — many of which the VCs have actually backed.
A few illustrative examples:
1. CitizenRe is a solar financing play that promises to let you rent a solar array that they’ll place on your home’s roof. Here’s the great part — you only have to pay the same rate for electricity that you are currently paying your local utility, for the life of the rental (up to 25 years). They make this claim for most parts of the country. Here’s the rub — how can this possibly work for the several signed-up customers in North Dakota, for example? There, you have extremely low power rates and pretty low government incentives. Even with a breakthrough solar PV technology, it’s going to be impossible for CitizenRe to make any profit offering solar power at around 6 cents per kilowatt hour for the life of a 25 year contract.
(9 July 2007)
