Just watched their Youtube videos...

[PaulLowrance]

Until they can make this generate a LOT more energy, it's looking about as useful as a sixth finger.

To you, maybe. To a scientist, it will be PRICELESS! One of the greatest discoveries of all time. The first gasoline motor barely ran by itself. The first LED could hardly be seen.

[WilbyInebriated]

The first gasoline motor barely ran by itself. The first LED could hardly be seen.

indeed. and only output a fraction of the 'horse power' that it was to eventually replace...

[PaulLowrance]

And look how many feet the Wright brothers flew the first time. He he, and now we fly to the Moon, Mars, and space probes at the ends of the Solar system.     And we haven't seen nothing yet!

[Bulbz]

Nice catch! Now we know how many watts it produces. Once the science & engineering community proves it, then the rest will be history. It probably won't be long after until it's powering homes.

Maybe... If Steorn doesn't get squashed by the Pythonesque foot of the oil baron first !

[solinear]

If this wasn't a modified electric motor, which we understand pretty well, I would say that we could plan on dramatic increases in efficiency, but this is basically a highly tuned electric motor that barely slides past unity.  To make this usable, they would likely have to be able to scale the effect beyond the very small magnets they are using (if they are producing .035 watts and at 103% efficiency, they are consuming a single watt) and increase the efficiency well above 103%.

As for whether .035 watts is useful... you could capture the wind from breathing and it would probably be more than .035 watts.  I can't express strongly enough how little power this is.  We're not talking "you can't keep your house at 75 degrees", we're talking "If it's 35 degrees outside, this won't bring it up to 35.1 degrees in your house."  We're not talking "You won't be able to run 5 75 watt light bulbs off this", we're talking "You can't run a single candlelight LED off it".

There are any number of systems that would generate more power for the same density.  Photovoltaics is the most obvious, but replacing your floor with power generating pads that produce power when you walk across the room would generate 1-2 watts while you're walking across the room.  Placing similar units on your furniture could generate significantly more power every time you sit down (around 100 joules every time you sit down).  If you sit down 210 times in a week, you'd be doing just as good as the highly tuned Orbo.

This isn't something completely new, it's a pulse motor.  They're not going to take this design and turn it into a 300% efficiency motor (input 10 watts, get 30 watts out).  The fact that they're keeping it at 1 watt in/1.035 watts out tells me that, after 3-4 years of development, they still haven't been able to scale it up from the very small scale they started with.

If usable amounts of energy are going to come from a modification to an electric motor, it's going to be a dramatic change from the standard motor, not just a highly tuned pulse motor that barely gets above unity.