Comment by sowbug
1 day ago
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.
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.
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...