Comment by sowbug
19 hours 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.
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...