Steorn

Steorn was founded in 2000 and, in October 2001, its website stated that it was a "specialist service company providing programme management and technical assessment advice for European companies engaging in e-commerce projects". Steorn is a Norse word meaning to guide or manage.

In May 2006, The Sunday Business Post reported that Steorn was a former dot-com company which was developing a microgenerator product based on the same principle as self-winding watches, as well as creating e-commerce websites for customers. The company had also recently raised about €2.5 million from investors and was three years into a four-year development plan for its microgenerator technology. Steorn later stated that the account given in this interview was intended to prevent a leak regarding their free energy technology.

The company's investment history shows several share allotments for cash between August 2000 and October 2005, the investments totalling €3 million. In 2006, Steorn secured €8.1 million in loans from a range of investors in order to continue its research, and these funds were also converted into shares. Steorn said that it would seek no further funding while attempting to prove its free-energy claim in order to demonstrate its genuine desire for validation.

Liquidation

In June 2016, the company informed shareholders that it had failed to meet expectations, that company founder Shaun (Seán) McCarthy was being replaced as CEO, and that operating costs were nearly €1 million per year. After investments totaling nearly €23 million over a ten-year period, in November 2016 the company shut down and laid off its staff, due to a lack of additional funding to continue operations.

The liquidator, from Deloitte, finished the liquidation process in May 2024, with €344,000 owed to creditors and only €80,000 in assets.

No specific details of the workings of the claimed technology were made public. McCarthy stated in a 2006 RTÉ radio interview, "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". In 2011, Steorn's website was updated to suggest that the Orbo is based on magnetic fields which vary over time. Barry Williams of the Australian Skeptics has pointed out that Steorn is "not the first company to claim they have suddenly discovered the miraculous property of magnetism that allows you to get free energy" while Martin Fleischmann says that it is not credible that positioning of magnetic fields could create energy.

Following a meeting between McCarthy and Professor Sir Eric Ash in July 2007, Ash reported that "the Orbo is a mechanical device which uses powerful magnets on the rim of a rotor and further magnets on an outer shell." During this meeting, McCarthy referred to the law of conservation of energy as scientific dogma. However, conservation of energy is a fundamental principle of physics, more specifically a consequence of the unchanging nature of physical laws with time by Noether's Theorem. Ash said that there was no comparison with religious dogma since there is no flexibility in choosing to accept that energy is always conserved. Rejecting conservation of energy would undermine all science and technology. Ash also formed the opinion that McCarthy was truly convinced in the validity of his invention but that this conviction was a case of "prolonged self-deception."

Many people have accused Steorn of engaging in a publicity stunt although Steorn denied such accusations. Eric Berger, writing on the Houston Chronicle website, commented: "Steorn is a former e-business company that saw its market vanish during the dot.com bust. It stands to reason that Steorn has retooled as a Web marketing company and is using the 'free energy' promotion as a platform to show future clients how it can leverage print advertising and a slick Web site to promote their products and ideas". Thomas Ricker at Engadget suggested that Steorn's free-energy claim was a ruse to improve brand recognition and to help them sell Hall probes, while Josh Catone, features editor for Mashable, believes that it was merely an elaborate hoax.