Yes, I was thinking the same thing. You can buy now on Amazon a hand-crank LED light for $12, so surely these can be made far more efficient and cheaper with $200,000.
I'm not sure why you think flywheels would be a better energy store than a bag of rocks.
Flywheels have a lot of engineering hurdles that can't be met for $5:
- they need to be well-lubricated, clear of dust (which I imagine to be a problem in some of the environments they're trying to sell to)
- they need to be perfectly balanced, or the shifting center of gravity will vibrate the housing - sapping away precious energy.
- they need to run at high, ever-decreasing speeds, which means generators that can extract a constant power level at different speeds
