I saw a post on Pat Phelan’s blog today about Steorn which sounded a little incredible, so I looked a little deeper into it.

The background is that an Irish company called Steorn put a full-page ad in the Economist saying:

At Steorn we have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy…. We are therefore issuing a challenge to the scientific community: test our
technology and report your findings to the world.

Full page ads in the Economist don’t come cheap so if this is a hoax, it is an elaborate one!

According to Wikipedia’s entry for Steorn, Sean McCarthy, CEO for Steorn said in an interview with RTE:

What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy, […] The energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy.”

I hope they prove me wrong but personally I don’t believe a word of it – see the promotional video and judge for yourself.