Comment by wglb
2 years ago
If that can be measured, I would be pretty surprised.
I would project that the drain from all possible drone charging is orders of magnitude less than the e.g. coronal loss or the static radiation that blasts my ham radio.
Any legal action would need to be able to document that loss, one would think.
But you agree the loss exists, right? It's simply difficult to detect from some aggregate noisy flow at a centralized location, because the system was never designed to make that easily measurable.
The amount could be estimated by looking at how much flying the drones do between charges, or by suing for access to charging/position telemetry of the units.
If the drones could meter their own consumption from the line using a utility-approved meter, anyone with a drone with said meter should be able to just tap onto lines at will and get a bill at the end of the month.
Not sure how that plays out in terms of the weight/packaging of the drone but seems feasible for at least larger drones.
Really depends who owns the lines; I doubt many T/D owners would want drones flying around by their lines, much less directly grabbing them.
A utility company can operate such drones without a meter, because they own lines and power.
I would argue that it is less than an order of magnitude smaller than the coronal discharge or other losses.
I suspect we are talking about 24 watts as compared to eg 1000 megawatt 500kv line. This is seven orders of magnitude difference. Totally lost in the noise.
If companies could sue Nature for potential lost revenue, they would.
1 reply →
> smaller than the coronal discharge [...] lost in the noise
This is again technically plausible but ethically irrelevant.
It's like the fallacy in: "It's OK for people to steal goods from that store, because the parent-company is very big and one theft won't even show up on their monthly financials and they've got spoilage and breakage too."
> I suspect we are talking about 24 watts
The video demonstration shows 50 watts of input.
Napkin-math: Suppose one drone uses 1000 (battery) watts flying around, and does so for 4 hours each day for a month. (Made possible by an improved version of this research that charges at 200w.) That's 4 kWH. The electrical price is $0.20/kWh.
That means siphoning $24/month for one drone. That's not a casual "keep the extra penny", that's a Netflix Premium subscription.
1 reply →
right now the loss does not exist. Its a cool experiment. If this was a big thing the drone fleet operators would simply get some kind of legal agreement with the transmission operator. But overall we are talking about really small amounts of energy.
> we are talking about really small amounts of energy
Napkin-math time: I see 4 motors, searching the model-number suggests each has a max draw of ~380 watts, so let's assume it averages 1000 watts in operation, for 6 hours a day, with a local cost of electricity at $0.20 per kilowatt-hour, and this continues for one month.
1000*8/1000*$0.20*30 = $36 per month per drone.
That's not give-a-penny-take-a-penny territory.
2 replies →
This video would probably suffice to document the loss, assuming the recharging was done without the utility's permission.