'''Overunity Dilemma'''

"Sunlight is not a dependable source of energy to power a solar panel. Thus, acting as a renewable source of energy, it has no value for half of the day by comparison to other sources of energy, such as: nuclear power."

You pose an interesting comment.

Micro-Cap electronic simulator has a macro for a neon bulb spark gap.

A macro is a circuit which models the complicated behavior of an electronic component to serve as a representational model for that complicated component.

Micro-Cap's macro for a neon bulb contains: capacitors, an inductor, a voltage source, a current source, and various behavioral voltage sources programmed with boolean logic. Here is its screenshot, ...



The presence of the voltage source is very interesting since it does not possess any voltage. So, why is it included?

A battery of zero volts has no impact, whatsoever, upon the circuit. It's presence is merely to provide an ammeter.

In Micro-Cap software, as in all of the other flavors of Berkeley SPICE to which Micro-Cap belongs, are incapable of providing a measure of current passing through a piece of wire since wires are not considered to be components. They're merely there to provide a connection among components and become an electrical node between them. So, in that limited sense, a piece of wire can provide nodal voltage, but not current readout.

Yet, in Paul Falstad's electronic simulator, his wires ''do'' provide an ability to measure both voltage and current passing through them.

So, that's the purpose of the zero voltage battery within Micro-Cap's macro for a neon bulb, spark gap.

So, what's the purpose for including a solar panel which is covered and kept hidden in complete darkness? The same purpose as the zero voltage battery within the neon bulb macro of Micro-Cap simulator: to provide a measure of current passing through it. The voltage has to come from somewhere else.

But, I suspect that a zero voltage solar panel, or a zero voltage battery, yields current if it is not physically damaged yet unable to hold a charge. In the case of a dead battery, the battery may come back to life (due to its regeneration) and explode if it was not originally designed to handle that much current passing through it.

And a solar panel of zero voltage has the additional advantage over a dead battery pack of taking up far less space and less mass. An array of solar panels can be hidden from light by stacking their panels and incorporating them into a small box tucked away inside an electric car's various electrical components.

Meanwhile, the voltage can come from somewhere else.

In my simulation of an overunity circuit based on the design for a shorted transformer (such as is exhibited by the experiment, on YouTube, of MrPreva), the signal voltage comes from a 1.5V sine wave generator. Yet, its "working" voltage comes from a capacitor positioned adjacent to a pair of large coils. Together, they create a node between them which amasses so much voltage – greater than the feeble voltage coming out of the sine wave generator – that this capacitor/inductor arrangement overwhelms the feeble voltage of the sine wave generator with a flow of current in addition to its own feeble current causing the sine wave generator to "look like" it's generating nearly 150A when in fact it is not since it is incapable of generating that much amperage from so little volts.

Thus, this feeble generator is similar to a zero voltage battery in that it registers current passing through it without providing the source for that much amperage.

Or, to put it another way, ...

The dead battery, or hidden/covered solar panel, converts the application of an exterior source of voltage (which is impressed upon itself from outside of itself) into current and, thus, satisfies this weird criteria of seemingly producing far more current than they are capable of producing.

In designing overunity circuit simulation over the past six years, I often find it necessary to split the voltage source from the current source into multiple areas within a circuit. Thus, I find the shorted transformer of MrPreva's design, to be useful in that it is a step-up/step-down transformer which amasses a domination of current on the side of its smaller coil versus an accumulation of voltage within the coil on its other larger side.

But this is a different method, although with a similar intention, to produce similar results under different circumstances. And it works, best of all!

Overunity (more output than input) is always a matter of tricking conventional wisdom into yielding unconventional results. There's not hidden batteries, but there is technical trickery involved. This is not an attampt to grapple with the conceptualization of a flashlight circuit. This is far more subtle in its own way.