The Seiko Kinetic Wrist Watch

Rigorously, any overunity system—electrical or otherwise—must be an open thermodynamic system far from equilibrium.  I wear such a little system on my wrist, in my wristwatch, which taps the mechanical energy in its dynamic environment (my arm movements) to move a little mass, which operates a little electrical generator, which charges a little capacitor, which powers a little motor operating the watch.  It's a neat little watch and a clever design by Seiko. It exhibits a broken symmetry in its energy exchange with its active environment (my mechanical arm movements).  Effectively it receives "free" energy and uses that to power itself and its load. [11]

Miscellaneous em Overunity Power Systems

A solar cell is a perfectly valid EM overunity EM power system, as is any windmill-powered generator.  Any receiving wire antenna of itself is a free energy "electrical" system whenever it freely receives EM energy arriving from space and then outputs its received signal to the circuit.  It receives energy from its environment and outputs most of it, with some scattered as heat.   A hydroelectric turbine-driven generator is also an overunity EM power system, as is a simple paddlewheel in a river.

The operator himself does not have to input energy to any of those systems.  They are in fact all "energy converters", freely converting the form of some energy they freely receive from the environment, so that the output is electrical energy.  More rigorously, they are open systems far from equilibrium in the energy exchange with their active environment.

However, those systems suffer from the common pandemic of modern EM power systems: the design of the external electrical circuit portion to so that it rigorously enforces Lorentz symmetry during excitation discharge into the load, by self-regauging itself to implement it. Hence these systems are not good solutions of the "energy crisis", nor do they solve the ever-increasing problem of polluting the biosphere with hydrocarbon combustion products and nuclear wastes.

The Mead-Nachamkin Zero Point Energy Converter

In 1996 Mead and Nachamkin { [37] } were granted a patent on an overunity EM power system process for extracting zero-point energy of the vacuum.  If one closely examines the patent wording, the device is patented as an energy converter and does not overtly state that it is a free energy system.  It is, since the input energy is freely received.

Because energy cannot be created or destroyed, any "free" energy system a priori is a converter.  It must receive the energy from its active environment, and convert that energy to a form usable to power its loads and losses. [12]

Open Systems Far from Thermodynamic Equilibrium

In any overunity system, the total of the operator's energy input and the environmental energy input is always equal to the total of the energy output in the load and the energy dissipated in the system's losses.

The thermodynamics of such systems has been well-known for decades { [38] }.  As an example, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1977 for his contributions to that kind of thermodynamics.

The tired old classical thermodynamics with its infamous second law—which only applies to a closed system or a system in equilibrium with its environment, [13] is all that the skeptics ever seem to have studied or know about.  One would wish the arch skeptics would find out what has happened in physics and thermodynamics in the last 40 years! Classical thermodynamics does not apply unless the given system is in equilibrium with its active environment.  It does not apply to any system out of equilibrium.

A common example of such a disequilibrium system is the windmill, or the waterwheel, or the sail boat—all used for thousands of years.  Each of those three overunity systems rigorously obeys the conservation of energy law while it's doing free work.  It just gets that free energy from its environment, and converts it to a form useful to its owner/operator.  The operator does not have to furnish the input energy to it.  He still has to pay to build it and maintain it, just as with any other system.  The energy is free, but the system and its maintenance are not free.

The greatest of all overunity systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium, however, is the ubiquitous charge.  Every electrical or magnetic charge in the universe is already an overunity EM power system, freely receiving a flux of virtual photon energy from its seething vacuum environment, converting a portion of that absorbed energy, and outputting that converted portion as an EM energy flow across the entire universe.  Presently we crudely harness these natural free energy systems called "charges", in our rather inept power systems. 

In the future we must  learn to apply the free energy aspects of charges and dipoles in far more efficient ways.  Presently we build only electrical power systems which kill the free "source dipole converters" faster than they power their loads.

That is really because we have never seriously tried to build anything else!