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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?
by kulahan 10mo 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?
- mothballed 10mo agoThe proposed initial use case is use as inspection drones for the power company themselves.
- sowbug 10mo agoWhen 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.
- ikidd 10mo agoWe 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.
- toss1 10mo agoHere'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/exam1rwpsolution.html https://user.physics.unc.edu/~deardorf/phys25/rwp/exam1rwpso...
- ikidd 9mo agoYah, he was just running a 12V bilge pump on a battery, and used a charge controller to keep the battery up so just needed a voltage slightly above the battery voltage. I doubt it used a kWh per day as it cycled. He might still be using it, haven't talked to him in a few years.
- gmiller123456 10mo agoThe Mythbusters also tried it in the "Free Energy" episode. They pretty much said extracting any useful amount of energy is not worth the effort.