…UNLESS YOU’RE TESLA, HAH!
Transformers are analogous to gearboxes. His vibrating piston “earthquake” thingie started out as a steam-powered 60Hz AC generator. If we follow that theme, then Tesla’s turbine should be a high-freq AC power supply. Use it to drive induction motors. But I’ve never followed the Turbine history, so maybe he had different plans.
Back to OP. Tesla’s claimed “worldwide wireless power” phenomenon only works at radio frequencies well below 20,000Hz. That’s far, far below the bands used today (even AM radio only goes down to 500,000Hz.) In theory it’s compatible with modern radio/video/wifi etc. On the other hand, the signal intensity was supposed to be very large, so the overall effect would be similar to living near a big power line, or near an AM tower. Long wires (such as loudspeaker cables) might pick up some unwanted broadcast power. Corroded metal roofs and rusty wire fences can receive the signals and re-transmit them locally as broadband noise. Radio Hams have this same problem in their neighborhood: sometimes their voices come out of neighbors’ stereos, and the culprit is a corroded metal object near the transmitter.
The tradeoff would be to provide electric service to everyone, and the ability to live anywhere on Earth, even on mountain tops or deep in wilderness, without needing wind turbines or propane deliveries. If Tesla’s claims were not fantasies, then you could even commute to your remote home via a wireless power vtol aircraft.
But you wouldn’t want to live anywhere near one of Tesla’s towers. The broadcast method appears to be a variation on the Hartley oscillator: giant pulses emitted in synch with the resonator sine wave. A constant barrage of lightning bolts. But electromagnetically no worse than a Florida thunderstorm.
In the 80s William Gibson wrote “The Gernsback Continuum” about a Fritz Lang Metropolis future encroaching upon our own. What few realize is that early in his career, Hugo Gernsback was a Tesla devotee, spent numberless hours in conversation, and the 1910 super-science future filled with giant flying wings and electric cities were not Gernsback’s personal invention. The front cover of “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” shows a “future city” avenue …lined with gigantic Tesla coils. Tesla docs depict wireless-power personal cars with glass dome windshields. The glass-bubble “future car” was not a 1950s fantasy, it was a 1905 fantasy. 
http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/technical/electricalexperimenter/?g2_page=3
1913 scene w/beamed power, lit by artificial aurora
http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/technical/electricalexperimenter/ElectricalExperimenter1913-05.jpg
Another problem with Tesla’s Broadcast Power.
Natural lightning should offer a functioning example of Tesla’s system. Indeed, Tesla claims to have made the breakthrough from observing EM effects of a nearby storm. But modern research says nothing about this. Either it doesn’t actually work …or the experts never tried making the observations Tesla did.
The frequencies of the EM-wave output of a cloud-ground lightning strike goes from DC up into GHz, and the waves of lowest frequency should pass around the Earth many times. In addition, a geometrical focusing effect should make the returning waves strongest at a point on the other side of the planet, and also at the location of the lightning strike. Since waves above ~100KHz don’t make it around, the EM pulse will be wideband, but with Fourier components above ~100KHz missing. On the first pass around the Earth, for an ideally smooth Earth, this gives a sort of circular ripple shape spread across the landscape, with 1.5KM between the concentric rings. As time passes and the waves go around, higher frequencies are successively damped. If at 20KHz, there is many percent of loss per pass, then after a few passes around the Earth the components above 20KHz will go missing. This leaves a circular ripple with 15KM between the rings. Since lightning behaves as a miles-long radio transmitter, probably most of its energy is concentrated at the lower frequencies at the start.
So a lightning strike should briefly be surrounded with EM standing waves in a “bullseye” shape, with the wavelength growing longer over time. A radio receiver for sub-100KHz VLF signals should detect a falling “chirp” as well as an 8Hz echo effect produced as the initial less-distorted pulse goes around the Earth multiple times.
The books on lightning EM research I’ve encountered don’t mention any of this. Researchers only see one EM pulse, although that pulse does change shape in proportion to the distance from the strike. Strange, since it should be there. Maybe Tesla, as well as my above reasoning, is wrong.
On the other hand, VLF radio hobbyists have picked up just such echoing chirp signals from distant single lightning strikes. Maybe the lightning researchers are concentrating their attention on the enormous initial pulse received directly from the lightning, and not noticing the tiny signals trapped in the global waveguide, nor the “bullseye” concentric rings that should appear for a few seconds following every CG lightning strike.