Comment by kulahan
1 month ago
Maybe this is silly to complain about, but how would power companies charge these drone companies for electricity consumption? Seems… just so easy to steal?
1 month ago
Maybe this is silly to complain about, but how would power companies charge these drone companies for electricity consumption? Seems… just so easy to steal?
When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who had somehow wrapped some wire around the power lines enough times to siphon off an interesting amount of power. I never saw the wire myself, so it might not have actually happened. But people certainly talked about doing it way back when.
We had a neighbor that put loops of wire under a 600kV line and got enough power to run a water pump for cows. The square law makes that kind of thing pretty low-return.
Here's some calculations on the return [0] (usual caveats of stuff found on the internet). Quite low returns indeed!
[0] https://user.physics.unc.edu/~deardorf/phys25/rwp/exam1rwpso...
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The Mythbusters also tried it in the "Free Energy" episode. They pretty much said extracting any useful amount of energy is not worth the effort.
The proposed initial use case is use as inspection drones for the power company themselves.