I love the spirit of this and am also a big fan of Nikola Tesla, thanks for posting.
But I think we need to be a little careful right now to channel our energies into the right things, not muddying waters further with confusing terminology.
Free energy just means what it says, like free money, energy or money which comes for free. No particular solution is associated. Nikola Tesla knew that those two things have to come hand in hand, if you have one or the other, then you have both.
He wanted to give us those, together with free internet-like connectivity with his Wardenklyffe project, around 1900. But free money was not in the interests of its only funder, JP Morgan, so the project was defunded.
We can only definitively identify either free money or free energy, by seeing them in action.
We saw them in action very recently when 4tn stimulus per month was being issued in the US. Money was for free, because as it was being issued, with nothing asked in return, we saw its value go up, and we saw it do some incredible things, like make oil prices go negative, and cause the only spike of environmental recovery seen in fish and coral stocks, amongst other things.
Seeing that free money in action, and knowing that free money can only be sustained with a free energy source, we have to deduce which source it was, which was also in action. It wasn't oil, because obviously the oil price had gone negative, so what else could it be?
Next in the list is solar. When we analyse the characteristics of it, compared with any other form of energy used previously, we see it is unique. Firstly its Joules are delivered to us with no need for us to do any per-Joule work to receive them. That is a reasonable technical definition of free. Cost means work. Work which needs to be done to construct the materials of the solar panels or whatever hardware is used, to receive the Joules in solar, is not part of the equation, since in theory all of that can also comprise only more solar Joules, none of which require work to receive.
Secondly, also very important, those Joules do not come from anything, or any work done on Earth.
When we realise this, we might then try to assign a solar energy standard, for the money issued in stimulus, which could only have been backed by solar energy, a number of Joules per dollar (Future story, anybody?)
There were already tens of Gigajoules per second during daylight hours going into the economy, every sunny day, in the US, and that had grown steadily from near nothing over the previous twenty years or so. Imagine the figures represented by the Joules accumulated and yet never monetised there.
The reason we can say it was never monetised except by issue of stimulus, is that money not issued as stimulus is money issued as debt.
Debt can only translate to promises to do work, not promises to receive for free, so the Joules of energy that might equate to a dollar issued as debt, can only be obtained by doing work.
There we see exposed the fundamental systemic mechanism tying us into energy extracted, from any and all sources of materials and life resident on Earth including trees, livestock, and human lives.
So money issued as debt can't represent the joules of energy received from the sun.
We have to conclude the only way to represent the Joules of energy received for free from the sun is to issue the money for free, in a similar way as nutrients might be issued for free within a plant, in response to the Joules of solar being received by its leaves, to carry those valuable Joules to Earth.
Then we might notice that the plant has to do work to draw the Joules it needs to grow itself uowards from Earth, sucking nutrients upwards, against the forces of gravity, until the point it begins to form leaves. But after that, it needs to do no more work, allowing the Joules received by its leaves to be carried downwards by the nutrients created in response receiving those Joules, downwards to Earth, assisted by gravity. In fact, growth of the tree thereafter logically assists this process, by expanding the nutrient channels, allowing them to flow more easly.
To me it looks like humanity is like a tree shoot which has just sprung its first leaves. Our leaves are the solar farms all over Earth.
Now all we need to do, to put things right, is issue the money needed to honestly and fairly represent those Joules of energy being received and put to use by those solar farms, in a similar way as is done by nutrients in trees, and everything else falls into place.
No more extraction, no more planetary waste, and no more unnecessary loss of life, human or otherwise.
How long will it be until most people understand this? I have no idea there, only complete faith that it will happen, sooner or later, otherwise we are finished, like a plant that didn't learn to use the energy of the sun, or a baby that didn't learn how to gulp in its first breath of air, or that the Joules of real limitless sustainable energy don't come from things that need to be sucked…. and all the while, whilst solar energy necessarily continues to scale up, we will watch money-as-debt devalue, because in the end it isn’t the money which is valuable, it is the energy being put to use.