Tesla didn’t do solar. He didn’t need the sun. He extracted energy out of the ether and converted it into usable power.
Just google the term Tesla energy out of the ether. Very interesting..
Vibrational kinetic energy captured from the very vibrations of the earth was one way he did it.
I remember one shuttle mission where they tried to unravel a thin wire about a mile long. The goal was to see if the wire would pick up magnetic energy fluxes strong enough to generate electricity from. Apparently they only got only a few hundred yards or so, then the mechanism got stuck....still with what they did get out they did get some power production from it. So the experiment wasn’t a complete flop.