We recently had a story about the non-event that was to have been the public demonstration of the Orbo from an Irish company called Steorn. As it turned turned they had some technical difficulties with a machine that was supposed to provide free energy forever. Any claim of free energy is clearly to be taken with more than the usual dose of skepticism before being summarily dismissed.

Ryan, the chief gadget hound over at Engadget managed to track down Sean McCarthy the Chief Executive Obfuscater at Steorn and got an interview. Given the ease of getting patents granted these days, the fact that they have not attempted to directly patent this "technology" is not a good sign.

[Source: Engadget]

Heard of Steorn? How about Orbo? There's a good chance they spell h-o-a-x, but so far no one's admitting as much.

Sometimes it's worth questioning just what someone's intentions are in the green energy biz. Forbes did just that a while back with Zap and a British company, Steorn, is getting some attention these last few days because of a failed public performance of their supposedly amazing Orbo free energy technology.

Here's the deal: Last year, two Irish businessmen, Sean McCarthy and Richard Walshe, and 28 Steorn investors took out an ad in the Economist announcing their free-energy system and invited scientists to join a 12-member jury to double-check the machine (?) and the numbers behind it. As you can probably guess, a lot of scientists signed up.

The Orbo is supposedly a system of magnets so positioned as to keep a central wheel spinning and produces like 285 percent more energy than what was used to run the machine. There's not a whole lot more publicly available than this, because Steorn folk are talking about legal issues and wanting to make sure the science is valid before releasing the full details. What Steorn will say is that, "Orbo is the brand name of our free energy technology. Orbo is a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy. It can be applied to power products ranging from portable music players to cars."

Read more about this Steorn and Orbo after the jump.