I can’t find anything on their site now (they seem to discard, rather than archive stuff), but yes, they’ve claimed to have built working models and they’ve claimed to measure the efficiency at multiple hundreds of percent.
It’s definitely, definitely a scam. There’s no possibility that they are honestly mistaken.
I still hold on to a fond and ridiculous hope that this is all part of The Lost Experience.
-FrL-
Another thing that just doesn’t hold true is that they’re not nearly excited enough about it. If they had what they say they had, they wouldn’t be plodding their way through long-winded and unnecessary evaluations by jury - they would either be shouting from the rooftops and giving the thing away to everyone, or they would be saying nothing and working very hard to scale up production and protect their future revenue.
The whole laid-back "Oh, yeah, like we discovered this sort of cool free energy machine, y’know’ thing is just another reason why this has to be bullshit.
Some useless and incomprehensible (yet fun) pictures and animations of Orbo in operation:
-FrL-
This from the Wikipedia article is interesting:
-FrL-
Or has a small battery hidden in the base, and when discovered, the promoters say, “The battery? Just ignore that; it’s helping the system over the top until we can work out a few bugs.”
The first phase of jury validation (which apparently started in January and still is not finished… for some reason…) was supposed to certify that the machine has a “Coefficient of Performance greater than 1.” I thought that meant that the thing gives out more energy than it recieves, but after looking at the Wikipedia page on Coefficient of Performance it appears that’s not what it means.* And notice that the “example” toward the bottom of the article seems to make it clear that a CoP >1 is the norm, rather than the exception.
-FrL-
*However I do not claim to have found the article particularly comprehensible on a three minute readthrough.
In good fun, here’s someone offering a theory as to how the device might work.
It’s mostly a series of diagrams which fail to demonstrate much of anything. Then at the bottom of the page we have this passage:
which sounds to me as though it amounts to saying (to the extent that it says anything at all), “It doesn’t actually work, but maybe it will work if we jiggle it.” 
What the hell is a ‘Scientist’ anyway.
You can’t get a degree in it. I doubt any job titles are ‘Scientist’. Beaker, the muppet is in a footlocker somewhere.
I agree - if you spend any time looking at these candidate free energy devices and magnet motors, one thing stands out - they all almost work - they all just seem to have one tiny ‘sticking point’ that the inventor plays down as trivial and just needs to tweak then it will work. In truth, these devices are an exercise in making the fact that they stop, look trivial.
FTR, the relevant portion from her report:
-FrL-
Actually, a lot of jobs are titled “Scientist” or “Senior Scientist” or some such thing. I’ve been to environmental engineering firms, for instance, who employed “Scientists.”
I’m sure all of them would laugh at the “Orbo.”
Our team has “Scientists” and “Senior Scientists.” As best as I can tell their job is to gather requirements, write responses for RFQ and take credit for the developers’ work.
That page deals with heat pumps though. Heat pumps move heat (energy) around so you get more energy out than it costs to move the heat, but at the expense of cooling down your heat source.
Steorn have explicitly stated that their device is not a heat pump.
They have nothing, and I’m curious why it is generating any interest at all.
If someone has a perpetual motion device, it can be demonstrated Right Now. There is no such thing as a future timeline or completion of development or anything else. If those things are in the equation, you don’t have a source of free energy–you have an idea of how you could get some. And an incompetent idea, at that.
I’m just amazed at the interest in the possible underlying principles when only a fool would have any reaction except to say, “To make this claim, you must have already done testing and validation yourself. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
This is either Performance Art, or Twits. Probably both. Any real investors will be warned they could lose some or all of their investment, and that the underlying principles (and principals) may turn out to be in error.
As I understand it, the company is in pretty shaky financial shape - maybe this is all just fluff to try to stave off bankruptcy by making themselves look interesting to speculative investors. I still think the guys in charge will find a way to issue themselves nice golden parachutes before what remains of the company shrugs and admits it doesn’t work, after all, sorry.
Okay, just to be clear:
But.
They can’t patent it because all of the big patent offices have stopped accepting applications for anything that is supposedly a perpetual motion device. So, if I’m wrong about 3 above and somebody does invent one at some point, they actually won’t be able to patent it (at least not at first - I assume that given an honest-to-goodness demonstation of it, the patent offices would eventually change their policy).
As for the peer review, see 1 above.
Except you CAN patent a perpetual motion device, as long as you don’t call it a perpetual motion device and take pains not to claim it’s a perpetual motion device. So if they have some way of extracting energy from the Earth’s magnetic or gravitational field that’s not “perpetual motion” in the physics sense, it’s just a source of practically inexhaustable energy. For instance, you can extract energy from the Earth’s rotation…free energy! This is done by tidal energy generators…tides lift up the water, and we extract the energy when the tide is low. Free energy! Except this isn’t perpetual motion, because doing so slows down the Earth’s rotation by an itsy-weeny amount.
So they would have no trouble patenting a device that generates energy when you wiggle magnets around, as long as they don’t call it “perpetual motion”.
I don’t think it’s as simple as just not saying the magic words ‘perpetual motion’ - for example, the UK Patent Office says it won’t accept applications for:
(citation)
(emphasis mine)
-which certainly applies to Steorn’s device.
You (properly in my view) negative your own point here, though.
If they can make bullshit, that’s great. Bullshit contains energy. You can burn it, ferment it…