I have to agree with Harland about this. Even if it were technically possible (which I doubt, and I am an electrical engineer by profession), the idea of free unlimited power, presumably supplied by the government, is a flawed one.
For starters, almost nothing is free. At a minimum, there would be the cost of the infrastructure. After all, solar power is “free,” all you have to do is have the right apparatus to harvest it in a useful form. Even oil is “free” in the sense that we just have to pump it up out of the ground. Tesla’s energy source would not be any more free than these. If it were lower cost than these, it would be amazing that his system weren’t in use already (by the stupid capitalists Harland refers to).
Then there is the political-economy aspect. Imagine that the government had decided to supply free horses and carriages to everyone in 1890. The buggy-whip industry would still be alive and well today - and our streets would be piled high with horse- ____. That would hardly have been the way to advance transportation technology. It would have been frozen in time, and change would never be allowed by all the special interests. We would just have condemned some more industries to state-sponsored corporatism (e.g., the horse breeding and carriage building business would all be effectively under government control). The insider-class would get rich (not through meritocracy but through political privilege), and the ordinary people would suffer.
Rich