At 14:42 in the video you see him manually starting the fly-wheel rotating, which (depending upon its weight) is a massive extra input into the system. From that you get friction, which translates into heat. It's old news that even dead non-rechargeable batteries can often be given a bit of extra juice by mildly heating them. Add to that the fact that after it's spinning all that you need is for the input batteries they never want to talk about to provide the small extra juice you need to keep it spinning.
Apparently the National Bureau of Standards agreed:
in no case did the device's efficiency approach 100 percent.
I'll even go so far as to say I'd be happy to let them start the system up with external power, but so long as he refuses to disconnect all external power sources once the machine is supposed to be "self-sufficient", then we've all got more then enough reason to smell a rat.
Why does he ever need to start it up? Why not just leave it running all the time? How come his house is still connected to mains? After nineteen years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment he hasn't built a single engine big enough to run his TV and fridge yet? Here's a good one, since he's such a humanitarian: why not run a line out to the edge of his property so that all the neighbourhood kids can recharge their batteries for free? Seriously, you throw a couple of power points on the edge of your property that anyone can use for free and you can be sure that eventually the whole town will be ponying up the cash to build their own engines to power their own houses 'forever'. Why doesn't he run his car that way the whole time? He can't claim that he has never been able to afford it because he
has received funding in the past, and nothing has ever come of it.
Why? Because regardless of whether or not he actually does believe his own BS, the universe doesn't.