In the future, the Laws of Thermodynamics will be tossed in the rubbish bin.
In the future, people will think that people in the 20th century were idiots who thought the earth was flat the aether didn't exist.
Not only will we think that free-energy exists, we will point at SEVERAL devices that create continuous, non-polluting, energy. Several devices, not one. It will be like powered flight. One day people are thinking that "If God intended man to fly, he would have given them wings" and the next we have all kinds of flying machines.
Science Fiction will take a huge hit. All those "hard science" fiction books will seem silly talking about how much energy it takes to fly around space. Also our thoughts about time, and getting around the solar system will seem more like fantasy that today scifi.
Modern Materialistic Science will try to hold the line against these anti-atheist ideas, but they will fall in the face of truth. Especially truth that is as in your face as flying cars.
Fortunately, there are several electricity making devices that do not have to blatantly disprove science that can be implemented now, or at least soon.
Ocean wave energy
Instead of putting windmills out in the water with big pylons for whales to crash into, why don't we use the moving water to generate electricity? You know, those waves that are always moving, right beneath those windmills, that aren't always spinning?
We just need to build a large paddle wheel and stick it near the shore where the waves are pushed up to the surface of the ocean.
The thing that stops this kind of things is that people complain about ruining the view. (but they allow windmills…) To those people, we can put these paddle wheels right next to a Ferris Wheel.
There is nothing complex about this science-wise. It is just engineering something that can survive storms and the saltwater.
Imagine all those cities on the coast no longer needing miles of electric lines to feed them power.
Parabolic mirror solar electricity + energy storage via elevated water
Yes, the title has to be that long. And, again, there is no science to wait for this. It is already done. Just have to keep the govern-cement from tearing it down. (literally)
It is quite easy, especially in the deserts of SW America, to make steam from water with parabolic mirrors. Have that steam turn a turbine and create electricity.
The problem is that the energy is not aligned with peak needs the power plant owning people HATE that their money will be stolen from them. Their coal powered electric plants would be sitting idle through the day.
Storing energy is actually quite easy. And people were talking about it being profitable to buy energy at night, and then sell it during the day.
The means is by pumping water up to a holding tank at night, and then letting it flow down when power was needed during the day. California with all of its mountains everywhere has many spots with 100-200' drop within a mile of each other. California could be off of oil/coal sooo fast it would make your head spin. (even without cannabis)
Geothermal Energy
Again, this is an engineering problem. No need for advancements in science.
The key is to use a refrigerant that boils about 150° F. Such as Tri-fluouro Tri-chloro ethane. Then you do not have to drill a 5 mile deep well (with all the problem of hot pockets and explosive gases), you just have to drill a 3 mile deep well. Which is easy as drilling an oil well.
At three miles you can bring up water hot enough to turn that refrigerant into steam. And turning a typical steam powered turbine.
The only difficult part is building the heat exchanger that will live at the bottom of the well and the pipes needed to bring the heated water to the surface. This is easy at a few hundred feet, but 3 miles of water is a lot of pressure. So the well will need to be filled with water, surrounding the water pipes, which makes other problems. But that is all engineering.
We could have these things powering small communities next week if the govern-cement didn't say that the only ones who can explore geothermal energy was ONLY their universities.
So, here you are. Three sources of continuous, non-polluting, electricity ready to go.
The only problem is political. BigOil does not want it. T.H.E.Y. want to maintain power. And that is only doable if you think that electricity is hard to get/expensive. If people start thinking that electricity is free-ish, no one will believe the "we have to raise energy prices" story we hear all the time from the electric companies.
T.H.E.Y. will fight tooth and nail, as dirty as they can, to stop these forms of electric production. If you did this, you will need to get public opinion on your side, and then you will still have to fight off "angry crowds" trying to stop you from building it. AND!!!!! you will have to stop paramilitary organizations raiding your site and sabotaging your equipment.
It is really sad that we may need real, portable, free-energy devices to break out of this control structure. Especially since we could have this mostly-free-energy next week.