Bob, by free, I mean that the infrastructure to accept the Joules that come in, after creation of the infrastructure, is paid by those Joules coming in.
In fact they potentially pay it off many times over, given that they convert directly to fuel which functionally replaces fossil fuels, with none of the pollution, and which then even converts directly to food (See "Solein"), all of which is valuable product, revenue from sales of which can go directly back into scaling up the infrastructure, all for free.
I wrote a story on that called "The Money Fuel Tree", some time ago on this, you can find it now via Google, inviting comments and criticism.
I still haven't seen any logical argument showing it to be mistaken or incorrect in any way.
If you employed a load of workers, who's jobs could be done by another load of folk offering to do the work for free, but to let them in, you had to do the work of pushing open your door, would you say those new workers were not free workers, because you had to push open the door to let them in?