Over Unity Electric Motors: The Future of Clean Energy or Bad Lab Work?

First gained mainstream press fame toward the end of the 1980’s as a possible engine for the zero-emission car. Are over unity electric motors the wave of the future or just a product of bad lab work?


By: Ringo Bones


During the second half of the 1980’s, a number of garage tinkers manage to gain press attention over their inventions based on an electric motor - most of them involving the esoteric concept of magnetic monopoles - that runs on “free energy”. Through a cycle of “repression” and PR raves – probably due to their set-ups failing to pass rigorous scientific peer review – free energy devices manage to survive till this day. Often marketed as “suppressed” technology via the Internet boasting that their particular “free energy” device has been actively kept out of the mainstream market by powerful Washington crude oil lobbyists. But do electrical motors like these fulfill the promise of free energy by claiming that once started initially by a lead acid battery, they would run forever without the need to draw additional power? Or just the latest marketing triumph of their “creators” savvy for on-line peddling of suppressed pseudoscience-based rip-offs.

After hunting high and low via the Internet and 1980’s era education / educator’s journals which our modest public library still manage to stock, the “science” behind over unity motors could be traced – in my point of view – to uncorrected misconceptions of electrical engineering students performing lab work. Lab work which, unfortunately, their instructors failed to vet them properly over the problems of “erroneous data” that could crop up during their lab experiments. The “erroneous data” collected by the Class of ’77 and onwards to which their electrical engineering laboratory professors failed to vet them. Is probably - make that the main - reason why an overwhelmingly high number of electrical engineers of impeccable competence still pursue their Quixotic quest of over unity free energy electric motors.

I mean first and foremost of all, an overwhelmingly high number of electrical engineering students – even till this day – lacked the full grasp of what constitutes true scientific experimentation, correct electrical voltage and current measurement procedures, decent documentation of acquired data, and its decent interpretation. Add to that the “perennial issue” of confusing average current readings with true RMS (root mean square) current readings. They – the electrical engineering professors and their lab students - should know by now that ordinary alternating current or AC meters lie like politicians desperate for votes. Plus, there is this something that electrical engineers knew since the time of Nikola Tesla called counter-EMF, which still mystifies most people. Even those professionally certified electrical engineers whose day jobs involve electrical engineering related work and design.

Put them all together and you suddenly realize how difficult it is – make that excruciatingly difficult – to measure power to an acceptably accurate degree. Especially when it involves “strange” non-sine wave waveforms of AC currents, power in- power out nonlinearities due to counter-EMF, sparking, noisy signal waveforms, harmonics due to inherently dirty AC currents, stray magnetic fields several times stronger than the norm, reactance, and other subtle esoteric hidden effects like stray cable capacitance.

The Laws of Thermodynamics since time immemorial still does not allow something for nothing, let alone allowing humanity to break-even when it comes to the “energy game”. This conservation of energy law tells us that there is no non-nuclear process known by which energy can either be created or destroyed. Unless we manage to create a technology allowing us to manipulate the entropy levels of a power generating system, then probably a truly clean and free energy – though it might involve very substantial start-up costs – generating system could become a reality.