Ask HN: Practicality of harnessing geomagnetic fields for electrical generation?
2 months ago
Years ago I would have asked this on the 'Overflows. Alas, those innocent days are long gone. I could always ask AI, but how can you know?
The Earth produces a moving magnetic field (small teslas, but large extent yes?). Moving magnetic fields produce electrical current, right? Could you add "geomagnetic power" to other clean/renewable sources with the right technical solution, or is it fundamentally impossible?
It's apparently been done, but the amount generated was very small and it's not clear it could be scaled up to any useful amounts.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/earths-magnetic-field
Excellent! I like it when experimentalists and technologists prove some significant set of theoreticians wrong!
Interesting read, thank you for finding it.
This seems like a very obvious solution. But of course I am ignorant on electricity generation and or the physics involved. I am hopeful someone will enlighten us.
Really hoping for some better, first-principles or technically comprehensive answers here from the HN hive-mega-mind....sigh. And I wasn't the only one... I reckon nobody gives out expertise for free these days, myself included, so I understand y’all’s reluctance. Double heavy sigh.
The trivial amount of power you can generate is great for nerd sniping[1] , but won't even light a flashlight.
I wouldn't expect a lot of discussion about it.
[1] https://xkcd.com/356/
Hmm, I'm not sure that's true. The 30cm Zn-something tube generates mcirovolts (1e-6), but you can imagine longer, and more, such tubes. With volume (width x depth x height) you can quickly scale up to 1000s of volts or more.
THat's just 1 experiment!
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