Selling "Force Dominoes"!

it doesnt say mist/crystal energy. maybe its just musical energy. LETS START DANCING.
then again, if crystal energy is made from crystals, where the hell do those crystals come from? perhaps from the surface of cradle, that we cant explore vog knows why? /conspiracy

by siphoning it from some source in the Clockworks. Wireless energy! Nikola Tesla was right!
As for the crystals, the only explanation is that sometimes Knights find it in the Clockworks - just like Luminite and its ilk - but the majority comes from the Strangers selling it to Knights personally for services, and other "stuff". And then those Knights sell/buy it to/from each other via the Trading Post. Why don't the Strangers provide the CE gratis? Because they love the Shinies.

Entropy. Even if you were able to attach them to something successfully, the rule of entropy would result in those things breaking, eventually.
Or it could just be that they have a pitifully low limit on how much energy they can output, and attempting to override it leads to it exploding.

@Ghret

As someone who understands entropy, you might find this interesting:

“The tendency for entropy to increase in isolated systems is expressed in the second law of thermodynamics -- perhaps the most pessimistic and amoral formulation in all human thought.”
--Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, Principia Discordia

And when you think about it, it's pretty much true. The idea of the 2LTD implies that everything in the universe is constantly and irreversibly tending towards chaos, as every transfer of energy that happens experiences losses due to entropy.

@Topic

Even if the force dynamo spontaneously creates energy (or even better, reverses entropy to create it), it would be output as mechanical energy. From there it would need to be converted into some other form of energy similar to crystal energy. Seeing as mist energy is supposed to emulate crystal energy, and mist energy is described on the wiki as something airborne and collected in a tank, I'm going with chemical-based energy for both on this one. Converting mechanical energy to chemical is horribly complicated and would see severe losses in the conversion, and finding a reasonable way to convert it would probably take longer than just opening the core and repairing the ship as per the current plan. Converting it to heat energy would be much easier, but it seems heat can only be used in upgrading weapons*, and not for powering elevators or other machinery.

*Although, one has to wonder why fire weapons need heating to begin with, or why heat doesn't thaw any of the freeze weapons. My best guess is that 'heat' is a colloquial term for some new, not-yet-understood kind of energy. Perhaps the knights are actually just using souls to upgrade your weapons and equipment, a la Demon's Souls and Dark Souls; 'heat' is collected from enemies and not from hot sources like fire vents, so it is feasible if we assume that souls allow for undeath in zombies and are somehow integral in constructs (as a replacement for AI, maybe?).

The use of the words "beguiling" and "seemingly" suggest that Force Dynamo isn't actually an endless supply of energy as the knights imagine it to be, but rather something that's just beyond their understanding.

#OverthinkingIt
#YesI'mDoubleMajoringInPhysicsAndEngineering

OP: "It can generate energy from nowhere. Why can't we just stick a bunch of them up our Mist Tanks and play all day long for nothing? It's canon."

Where do you think our Mist Tanks -get- the energy they generate? From the dynamos.