Another thing to consider is the search for better than break-even fusion reactors. Billions (maybe trillions) of dollars have been invested in this effort world-wide, and a lot of new science has been discovered, not to mention the advent of super-computers to model thermonuclear reactions of all sorts. No luck so far. If "free energy" does exist, and its practical application demonstrated and subsequently suppressed, why the continued interest in thermonuclear power generation?
Sure, there is plenty of deuterium available if that is the fuel of choice, but how can that possibly beat "free"? And why does the Star Trek Enterprise need dilithium crystals when it is surrounded by vacuum with energy free for the taking? Oops. That's still fiction. The
dilithium crystals I mean. Well, the Enterprise, anyway... the rocket scientists in Huntsville AL may be onto something with
pulsed fusion using dilithium crystals.
Solar energy comes closest to being "free" for the taking, once you have the solar panels built, a team of panel washers in place to keep them clean and performing at top efficiency, another team to provide maintenance and replace defective panels, plus a way to distribute the energy without excessive losses over great distances.
Storing solar energy is easy, if not exactly cheap: use it to pump water above a dam during the day and discharge the reservoir to generate electricity at night. A few hundred square miles of solar panels installed in the desert near Hoover Dam could do the trick. Might need to add a few more alternators at the dam to handle the increased electrical load. And some high-volume water pumps too. Might have to put out buoys to warn watercraft on Lake Mead.
High voltage transformers, with high voltage rectifiers to make DC, could efficiently transport energy over vast distances using super-conducting underground cables, either cooled with liquid nitrogen or perhaps with room-temperature superconductors if those are ever invented. Actually, significant power (>3000 MW) is already being distributed from the
Pacific Northwest Intertie to Los Angeles, California using high voltage DC transmission lines (not superconductors). So we have the technology, just not the economic incentive... yet.
Along these lines, someone has proposed reviving
Tesla's radiant energy transmission system to transmit electrical power from a solar farm, to be located near the equator, to "receivers" world-wide. This has about as much chance of being funded as
Tesla's original Wardenclyffe facility that was supposed to deliver wireless power anywhere in the world. As one of Tesla's original backers noted, "You can't attach a billing meter to that!" Whereupon all of Tesla's financing was terminated with prejudice. I can't comment on the veracity of "radiant" energy. This is supposed to be an unobservable form of longitudinal (rather than transverse) electromagnetic energy, perhaps tucked away in the vaccum until released into usable energy by (suppressed) Tesla technology.
