Modelling the new discovery of electrostatic rotation

["wigstonmagna" <andrew_ppp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A recent startling discovery in electrostatics has been made, which 
200 year old physics predicts, but which for some reason has been 
overlooked until recently.

Apparently if you charge up a sphere to a modest few kilovolts, 
fixed in place, and then suspend two other spheres close by, the 
other two spheres rotate. In the experiments described in the 
references below, they didn't
actually rotate, but instead torqued up their suspension filaments 
until the restoring force equalled the torque.

1 Wistrom, A.O and A.V.M. Khachatourian (2002)APL, 80(15), 2800-2801.
http://homepage.mac.com/awaspaas/rotation.pdf
2 Wistrom, A.O. and A.V.M. Khachatourian (correction) (2002), APL, 81
(25), 4871.
3 Wistrom, A.O and A.V.M. Khachatourian (1999), MST, 12(10), 1296.
4 A.V.M. Khachatourian and A.O. Wistrom (2003), J. Math. Phys., 12
(10), 1296.

They characterise this effect as a "Coulomb motor". My question is 
this: If it's a motor, where does the energy come from?

I assume that femm could model this in axisymmetric mode...but would 
it come up with the observed torques?

-Andrew