This is a road that’s well traveled for me. I have a family member who became obsessed with alternative/free energy because of what it would mean for society, and how it would be an essential building block toward post-scarcity. I followed along with interest.

What I personally found is that 99.9% of all claims of evidence or proof of free energy were, in the end, perpetuated by charlatans, grifters, and self-deluded nuts (often times incorporating their religion into it for good measure).

Generally, a handful of tactics they use to convince others of their legitimacy.

1. The ‘evidence’ is obfuscated by purposefully difficult to understand pseodo-science that can only truly be debunked by real experts (since laymen simply don’t have the required education to be able to discern truth from fiction), usually in the field of electrical theory. Some examples of those types would be Eric Dollard, Tom Bearden, and Dennis Lee. Their MO is generally that some fundamental aspect of science or engineering was dogmatically and incorrectly followed back when it was still a burgeoning field, or that some other obscure theorist at the time was suppressed or ignored by their peers, so they re-did all the equations/theory to its ‘proper’ state, which would then allow free energy to be created. (also, I don’t want to completely discredit the idea that certain fields can be ignorant due to dogmatism, just that when it comes to energy, it doesn’t seem to apply).

2. They invent a device that creates free energy, and are willing to give public (paid) talks about it, and may even wheel in some small contraption that spins around or lights up something and claim it’s working off free energy, but will always be extremely vague about how it works, or claim they would put their life in danger if they made the plans public. They may even sometimes claim that they’ve given enough information here and there to be able read between the lines and suss out for yourself how to create a similar device, either in their paid talks or in their extremely expensive books, which their followers will eagerly consume. Some examples of this type of grifter would be John Bedini, Bob Lazar, and Peter Lindemann (who, as a fun aside, wrote this article about how bar codes are the mark of the beast, and emit evil energies).

3. They allude to some previous inventor that discovered how to create free energy, utilizing existing myth and legend to convince you the conspiracy is real. The people most often referenced here would be Stan Meyer, Nikola Tesla, or the generalized legend of someone ‘knowing’ a guy who showed them a modified 100mpg carburetor on their car, which they then sold to an oil company to buy their silence, or if they cannot be bought, how they were killed.

In all cases, there’s nothing substantive behind any of it, but it would take such dedicated research and education to be able to debunk each one, that most unfortunately cannot dismiss the claims entirely (I was certainly one of those people for many years). It brings to mind an unrelated Noam Chomsky quote, “The information is out there, but only for the truly fanatic.” (paraphrasing).

Just to debunk the hyperefficient carburetor would take a non-trivial amount of time to become familiar with the thermodynamic efficiency of an internal combustion engine, how much potential energy is contained within a given fuel source, and what percentage is truly practical to extract. I don’t claim to be an expert in that area myself, but I’ve learned enough to know that while vaporizing gasoline (and then solving the issue with pre-detonation and sufficient quenching to prevent damaging the valves) would likely increase fuel economy, there are inherent limitations in the internal combustion engine that prevent it achieving truly epic economy.

Going down a different rabbit hole with Nikola Tesla would, if you’re fortunate, eventually reveal that while he made some solid contributions to the field of electronics, his overall prowess and legend was massively blown out of proportion (alternative short version here), as first hand historical documents reveal, all thanks to those few fanatics willing to do the digging in search for objective truth.

Saying all that, there is one energy invention that vested interests attempted to suppress, because it did work: Solar energy.

Exxon was, at one point in time, heavily investing into researching alternative sources of energy, including Photovoltaic and new battery technologies, using their monopoly position and extreme profits to operate research divisions sort’ve in the vain of how Bell created Bell Labs to use up their excess profits that otherwise would’ve been taxed. But once Lee Raymond got into power at Exxon, he cut all funding to those projects (as well as to their climate change research), and then actively engaged the company in suppression of Solar and other renewable energies due to their threat to corporate profits. They were never in a position to completely suppress it (considering how they suppressed their climate research, I’m sure they would have, given the chance), but they certainly slowed its adoption and advancement.

There is one ‘free’ energy concept that, on the face of it, may deserve funding for research to see if it has merit, and that’s Daniel Sheehan’s concept of potentially breaking the second law of thermodynamics at the nano scale. I put a bit more stock into this because he’s an established physicist at the University of San Diego, doesn’t claim that this does work, just that the theory should be tested, and hasn’t tried to grift anything.

And, of course, there’s Nuclear Fusion, which probably would be free energy for practical purposes, but I don’t think it’s being suppressed too much, except maybe by big oil getting congress to defund fusion research.

I’ve already probably written too much on this, so to conclude/TL;DR: Truly ‘free’ energy is, in most cases, an endless rabbit hole of lies, and a gigantic waste of time. It makes for a fun story, one that goes back quite far, even in film, but don’t believe any of it unless there’s some credible peer reviews backing it up.

As a solarpunk, I’m certainly in favor of post-scarcity, and while a limitless free source of energy would be convenient, it’s not really the limiting factor in achieving a post-scarcity society. Even Peter Kropotkin back in the early industrial revolution recognized that we could achieve a partial post-scarcity in many ways with the advent of automation, and it was largely economic and class forces preventing that from occurring back then.

I agree Star Trek had it right, though I dearly wish they had not hand waved away humans achieving post scarcity by aliens giving us replicators. It would’ve been much more interesting if, during those time travel episodes/movies, they had explored how human society could’ve achieved a semi-post scarcity before the Vulcans showed up, but that would’ve made for a much less dramatic story.

No. This is just a movie. There is no free energy. Free energy wouldn’t collapse the economy, it would accelerate it.

But there is no free energy. Physics is pretty clear on this. Even if it was possible to spend a trillion up front to create a system that generated energy at no additional cost, there is still the cost of transmitting the energy, there is still the cost of maintenance. Someone will still be able to extract a profit delivering the energy to you.

You can already experience free energy with solar panels and some batteries. World hasn’t ended yet.

People keep coming back to the free energy discussion and I don’t know why, because it’s moot.

The question isn’t is there a secret hoard of free energy.

The question is, are we ready? When you (you being me) talk about do we believe we’ve had things held back, the answer is of course. But not in terms of technology, but in terms of restraints.

If you gave every house in your country a battery, solar panels, a rooftop wind turbine and a ground source heat pump, you could revolutionize the grid requirements. But that’s expensive and quickly people would find a way to fleece the average person of their new found financial wiggle room. So again, it comes down to, how can we make it so money doesn’t matter?

Someone intent a holodeck so I can experience a world without monetary wealth.

When I hear free energy I think of perpetual motion machines and other notions that conflict with basic laws of entropy.

However, we’re absolutely interested in clean energy (that is, energy that doesn’t muck up our environment) and cheap energy (that is, energy that burns low or sustainable fuel). This is why we’re looking to mimic the sun and develop fusion. But fusion is super tricky. It’s so tricky we’ve been about 30 years away from fusion for over half a century. Meanwhile, the movie Chain Reaction didn’t feature a literally free energy source, just one so drastically cheaper than what we’re using now that it’s practically free. It’s the way that humans have been in existence for such a short time (in contrast to the cosmos, the earth, life or even some dinosaur species) that we practically don’t exist.

Another interesting thing to me, is our capitalist system has always half-assed solutions. For the longest time we used simple fission reactors that are not particularly efficient, elegant or clean, and right now we have a waste mess that is, in some places, a waste crisis. (I remember a LWT segment on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, why we haven’t finished building it, and what the consequences are having failed to do so.)

As I see it, the end game of capitalism is not to have a sustainable society of billions of people, but to have a sustainable society of one person that uses all the resources, and has replaced everyone else with automation (even to the point of curing his own loneliness with drugs or sexbots or whatever). So making production of stuff better, cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable, whatever, is not a priority. Heck, the dude may be happy with training an AI to mimic his own headspace and leaving that as his heir.

There are some really awesome paths towards better power, and while it’ll never be free, we can make it really cheap, so that households can afford gigawatts or yottawatts of energy use. But Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) is right that established industrialists will put all their resources toward stopping any disrupting technology or movement that might unseat them, even if it would benefit all of humanity, including them. Social power is just that sweet.