Harvesting electricity from high-voltage transmission lines using fences | Hacker News Reader

Harvesting electricity from high-voltage transmission lines using fences

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113 pointsbeardyw135 comments

People on that forum are trying to call this "stealing", which is ridiculous. This involves less that 1 watt of power. The law should not concern itself with trifles. It's more of a health and safety issue than any "theft".

They don't seem to get the nuance of the situation and can only see it in terms of black and white and following "the rules". I've personally seen this behavior a lot in the amateur radio community, where people were harassed or threatened for breaking some minor rule.

You should see what hooligans in Belarus and Russia get up to, now that is a legitimate problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4zO2gB70ps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqRT7J86rco

people think copying files can also be stealing which is even dumber

love those crazy russian youtubers, they're always so reckless... they're fun to watch from a safe distance

Copying files is absolutely not stealing since it doesn’t remove something from the owner. Stealing is conventional bad not because the thief acquires something, but because the original owner is deprived of something. I’d be pissed if someone stole cash from me even if they burn it. It’s not that they now have my property, it’s that I * no longer have* my property that’s the issue.

In the case of piracy, the original owner still has their property. So I’m sorry but “theft” is simply the wrong word. The original owner is not deprived of their data.

In the case of the fence however, the original owner is indeed deprived of some modicum of energy. The energy is indeed *taken*, or removed from the original owner. Thus I do consider this “theft”. It’s also true that it’s a trivial amount.

If you attach a load to an electrical line, then you are transferring power from the line for your use. This power is then no longer available for paying customers to use.

The load in question here is an inductive load, coupled through the air to the transmission line through well known physical principles.

If caught, you could be charged with theft for sure.

This is regardless of what people are doing or not doing in Belarus or Russia.

If you harvest loss that was happening anyway then it isn't theft; you can't be charged for theft for something someone else threw away.

That’s not really true, you’re not harvesting “loss”. When you use that electromagnetic field to induce a current, you’re creating another electromagnetic field that opposes the first one, and which resists the current in the high voltage line.

I’m not saying this is stealing, but it’s certainly not “harvesting loss”.

Well the ground is creating that exact opposing electric field anyway. If trees were planted to the same height as the wire, then the loss to the electric company is the same.

He's just in effect increasing the height of the ground slightly and tapping the potential difference. You might as well park a car underneath it, attach a wire between the body and ground, and get same or better results, because the surface area is larger (capacitively coupled).

It's not, you're increasing the total resistance felt by the line. There is no free energy.

My point wasn't "there's no free energy", of course the energy has to come from somewhere. But transmission lines have parasitic loss anyway. My point is that rather than that energy being lost to the environment generally it can be directed to a specific circuit and used. Obviously though this is a much much lower amount of energy than can be "actively" harvested.

Any amount of harvesting increases losses.

> you can't be charged for theft for something someone else threw away.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13037808

A woman has admitted handling stolen goods after being accused of taking potato waffles, pies, and 100 packets of ham from a bin outside of a Tesco Express in Essex. But if something is thrown away, when is it illegal to take it?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53724620

Getting all your cardboard recycled may often seem like a pain, but there is big money to be made from all this so-called "beige gold". And sadly this is attracting criminals around the world.

Thieves are making a fortune from stealing used cardboard that's been left out to be recycled, and selling it on. This means that legitimate recycling firms, and the city and other local authorities who take a cut from their sales, are missing out on tens of millions.

Yes, caught for "stealing" 63 milliwatts of electricity, from charging the 88uF capacitor in that video from 426V to 489V over a period of 40 seconds.

If that was running all year round it would consume 0.6kWh of electricity, which is probably capacitive losses to the surroundings and would be lost anyway.

If it ever got to court, it would be thrown out instantly.

This is the same mentality behind thousands of bullshit complaints to the FCC by radio amateurs because someone broke a petty rule somewhere, and it's why I want nothing to do with the amateur radio hobby at all. The vast majority of them the FCC ignores.

Inductively. You're not actually splicing into the line, or damaging the equipment to retrieve the power. It would be the same as putting a rain barrel to capture water runoff from a public road.

which is, in fact, illegal in several western us states

I'd imagine illegal for environmental reasons, however, rather than financial losses of some other party.

You would imagine wrongly, then. (At least in Colorado.)

Eh it's both. Rain water collects through the watershed and somebody owns the rights to that water.

So you can get into some really funky situations where you are "technically" stealing that water if you improve rainwater->groundwater retention on your property and as a result either have to dismantle the retention mechanisms or have to pay out damages.

Interesting. Do these rights also come with responsibilities ?

If the rights owner fails to collect their water in a timely manner( like heavy rains or blockages leading to water logging or flooding), should they be held responsible in any way ?

Water rights must be used in accordance with the terms dictated by the State when they were assigned. It's literally "use it or lose it".

I finished building three ponds on my farm in 2022. The permits dictated the times of year that I could store water (vs letting the flow pass unimpeded), what I can do with the stored water, and the size and function of bypass channels. If they decide it's necessary, they can tell me to install flow meters and depth gauges.

In times of drought, they unilaterally can order me to leave my ponds empty and let all water pass through, because older water right holders get precedence. They can hold me accountable if I do not follow their terms, up to and including revoking my permits.

Honestly, I'm not really sure it was worth the effort and cost, because the whole point was to improve water security on my property... but I have no meaningful control. It's completely bonkers, because my ponds have unquestionably improved the watershed's ability to store water. If anything, they should be paying farmers to build more small ponds like mine.

In other words, these government regulations pose a significant impediment to solving the growing water crisis. No sane person would go near the process, which I now understand is why most of the ponds in this area were built without permits.

Not financial, but it's essentially considered to be stealing water from the river basin, which is allocated by an old agreement [1]. I don't know the details, but I've heard that this has been relaxed quite a bit in recent years, with collection limits replacing outright bans in several jurisdictions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact

Yes, somebody owns the water rights which are separable from and often senior to land ownership. The details of how that works varies quite a bit from state to state and jurisdiction to jurisdiction and may be spelled out in your property deed.

Your house is attached to the grid via transformers, and gets all its power via an inductive coupling. Trying reason that it's inductive, and therefore a form of power transfer that is not stealing does not follow.

I'm interested. Can you give examples ? "... bullshit complaints to the FCC by radio amateurs ..."

I can't be bothered to search for it.

This isnt a one way argument. If this is stealing so is pollution reducing throughput sabotage. Prosecuting one but not the other is a value judgement which gets us to the nature of laws. They are not an end in itself and often times so stupid they get changed when unintended implications become clear.

edit: Someone posted https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23799/has-anyon... a bit down with the following comment that highlights this quite well.

>At least here in germany, it is unclear whether "stealing" via induction is really stealing, the corresponding law explicitly states that a conductor is necessary. There have been lots of urban myths about it being forbidden, but the fact is that near lots of high power mid wave radio stations you automatically "steal" lots of power, e.g. just by having a neon tube installed in the "correct" direction.

I think what drives some of the comments that it is illegal is a little bit of righteous indignation. "How dare you get free electricity, that's illegal because I'm not getting free electricity." It's kind of fake moral outrage

Also power trips (especially by radio hams) and territoriality (impinging on "their" spectrum). It really is animal behavior there, people are supposed to react better than that when such trivial "offenses" happen.

If there's deliberate high powered jamming going on, it's a completely different matter.

I can understand that, I'm a ham, if someone was doing something that was interfering with my station then I would be unhappy… Especially if it was deliberate. If it's not intentional, then, I really don't have much room to complain. I should better insulate.

Ha! Fun videos, tho quite a problem indeed!

Well, there is this cool physics/art installation of 1301 fluorescent tubes being lit by high-voltage lines [0].

There is the story I heard about early in the history of long-distance high-tension lines someone building an inductive coil to harvest electricity, and getting convicted of theft, which seem legit, since it is coupling with the lines and pulling more power than the grasses & ground would pull. There are also various references available online to cases, but the readily available ones don't seem to link to any court case (e.g., [1]).

I saw some back-of-the-envelope calculations about it being on the scale of 25 millivolts/mile, so you'd need quite a coil to get anything more useful than powering a bulb. Anyone with better calculations or actual measurements?

[0] https://jimonlight.com/2009/03/01/field-by-richard-box/

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23799/has-anyon...

Don’t click that first link

Explanation would be beneficial. Without you just make it more likely that someone does.

> Don’t click that first link

For anyone wondering, it redirects to ```https://ak.oneegrou.net/4/6521518```, which seems to be flagged as adware. Tested and the page got blocked on Firefox for Android

If in your jurisdiction there is a law against this then it is useful to be aware of it. This is not passing judgement, this is being informed. Then, you make your own informed decision and can argue your case if you get caught.

I suppose that one angle is not that one person is extracting a very small amount, it is that if you allow it then everyone can do the same.

Then they can start cracking down on the problem if it becomes widespread. But not when it isn't.

When the punishment far exceeds the loss caused by the "crime" then it is absolutely unfair, it undermines the rule of law itself.

Just being arrested over it could be considered punishment itself. Especially if it's a young person who gets into trouble, it is traumatic for them. It is also sending the message that the system itself is unjust, and he/she might not think twice before committing a real crime, e.g. real theft or fraud when he/she grows up.

> When the punishment far exceeds the loss caused by the "crime" then it is absolutely unfair, it undermines the rule of law itself.

What about punishment as a deterrent? People can commit a crime many times and only get caught once. Should they be punished only up to the cost of the one crime they were caught doing?

It’s not one crime, it’s all of them. The cost of enforcing one instance is more than the cost of all infractions, by all people. Enforcing such laws would turn the law into a farce.

You also have to include the cost of all crimes which would (statistically) happen if the first crime was not enforced.

Take, for instance, knives. In some jurisdictions and places, IIUC, knives above a certain size are illegal to possess in a public place (unless properly packaged and in the process of being transported). The cost of someone simply possessing a knife is obviously zero, but enforcement is expensive. So why is it (putatively) enforced? Because people possessing knives can commit other crimes, such as attacks and robberies. That is, one crime is enforced not because breaking that law is itself a cost, but because it might lead to other crimes, which are costly.

Joanna: [Confused] So you're stealing?

Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's, uh, it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.

And it woulda worked too if not for that pesky red stapler!

1. It is stealing

2. Its a tiny amount of power

Both can be true. Taking a single grape at the supermarket is illegal but no one would arrest you for it.

"Stealing"

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2022/10/26/the...

And those are just the ones that are so obvious the POTUS needed to make a statement.

Corporations steal trillions through dark patterns, intentiona obfuscation, mailicious marketing, price fixing, collusion, fraud etc.

Every piece of personal data shared between every online entity I have no relation to, or awareness of - is stealing from me.

stealing, in this case is a broad, vulgar term.

If you don't like stealing - then you wont get any place in successful business it would seem, based on the observable, documented, litigated and governmental precedents throughout history.

It depends on who's doing the theft. If it's a high status organization or individual they get away with it, including those behind the 2008 financial crisis. If it's a low status individual, they get put behind bars. It's a dominance hierarchy and those at the top hold all the cards.

Where does the notion of "depends" "whom" - lies...

(etymology on lies, lay ... it all boils down to, druidic functions of WERD. - And may Holy Wood be of interest - as its Druidic knowledge is scrubbed yet ensconsconced into the fabric of digital reality...)

[There is a significant impact on tech with Druidism that is not known]

Programming.

Is.

Formulation.

(look at the druidic etymology of SPELLING, CODING.

I am utterly dumb-founded (reaching upon dumbness once FOUND the conclusion)...

How few 'smart' people understand the functions.

FFS, networking was based on LSD.

DOS was a hottub LSD session, just like RIP and BGP.

"One person steals so other people stealing is ok" seems like a difficult moral position to defend.

"Taking a single grape at the supermarket is illegal but no one would arrest you for it."

Petty crime can have serious consequences regardless. In Germany we had a famous case, where a supermarket cashier redeemed a deposit receipt worth 1.30 EUR a customer had forgotten.

She was let go without notice for that and only got her job back after fighting through three instances. Only the highest court found the termination disproportionate and only because she had been working this job for 31 years.There was never a debate if this was stealing or not, just if the termination proportionate .

It can have serious consequences even (especially) if ignored.

If every customer slurped one grape, eventually there would be no grapes. Death by a thousand paper cuts and tragedy of the commons.

The HV lines run over someone's property, which implies there is some sort of contract in place, that presumably spells out what the property owner is allowed or not allowed to do. I'm not sure if this would be any kind of criminal issue instead of a private dispute.

Bingo.

The correct answer is that this is a contract dispute, not a state or federal dispute.

The electrical company leases a right of way for the lines across private property. There's a contract in place for that lease.

Does that contract have anything to the effect of "property owner will guarantee a stable, non-interfering electromagnetic environment in this right of way"?

Seems like they’ve never driven over the speed limit

Lol, the name of that channel ("Elektryka Prąd Nie Tyka") is a Polish saying, "electricity doesn't touch the electrician". I guess these hooligans weren't electricians!

> People on that forum are trying to call this "stealing", which is ridiculous

I strongly disagree. Many jurisdictions call it theft to tap off electricity, even though no electrons are taken (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft, https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/power-th...)

I would think that using a transformer so that one need not physically connect a wire wouldn’t necessarily change that (it would if the law in question mentions that connection a conductor is needed)

This is a sort of transformer (a very bad one, but still one), so I think many jurisdictions still would call it stealing. Whether they would think it worthy of prosecution is a different question.

I think the GP was making a point about the dimension of the business. Even if it's theft, stealing a mere watt should be negligible.

I think the point they're making is that whilst it is technically stealing, it is such a small amount.

Stealing a grape from the supermarket vs robbing a supermarket of all its fruit and veg. There's bigger fish to fry and the world doesn't have enough time and resources to go after or worry about such things.

> People on that forum are trying to call this "stealing", which is ridiculous

You should ask a lawyer. /s

During the Dot-com bubble, I remember a startup in Germany that placed boxes under high-voltage transmission lines to measure the current and sold that data to analysts.

Never heard of them again, so I guess in the long run it was either cheaper to buy that data.

Network frequency changes and fluctuates around 50hz. This change is random and unique. It is also captured on video/audio recording as background hum.

This data is quite valuable. You can reconstruct exact time (and region) when any video was taken.

The police keep track of this, and it can be used to validate audio recording evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_a...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38161677

https://datethis.app/

There is a lot of interest at the moment in monitoring lines. The capacity of a line can change due to things like weather conditions. The capacity is rated based on a conservative set of assumptions. Sensors mean that they could send more power safely. This could help connect more renewable power.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38983886

https://electrek.co/2023/12/07/heimdall-power-meteomatics-gr...

You can get all that data and more for free now on most interchange websites.

The various EU transparency laws/directives may mean that such data is freely published via ENTSO-E or similar...

With the right conditions underneath AC power lines, you can light (dimly) a standard fluorescent tube by, literally, grounding one end of it.

Gets turned into an art project now and then: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/madeinbristol/2004/02/...

If the current is indeed enough to cause the tube to glow, touching the air-end of the tube with your finger will increase the coupling with the overhead lines (you're salt water - good conductor) and the brightness will increase. Personally, I don't like to walk under HV power lines. I know it's safe. And yet, so very unsettling to think of the sea of power being waded through.

An artist used this effect to create a display of fluorescent light tubes.

http://www.infoniac.com/environment/artist-created-network-o...

This exam question is based on a news story about a farmer using a coil of wire to power his farm.

https://users.physics.unc.edu/~deardorf/phys25/rwp/exam1rwps...

I love this so much because there's no contact, but because the voltage on the power line is so high, the inductive power is not only measurable, but significant. I have no idea what the legality of stealing power wirelessly (potentially obliviously), but it is undoubtedly cool.

I couldn't find it, but I think French courts have a jurisprudence on this already (unless it's an internal urban legend from EDF, who knows): one day a EDF (French electricity producer) who was living close to a power line built an “antenna” like this to harvest electricity, and he bragged about it. EDF sued, and the defendant claimed that he was just collecting electromagnetic waves that were leaving anyway, but EDF and the experts summoned by the court argued that it wasn't the case and that he was in fact draining power. He was found guilty because he was doing that on purpose, and even if he believed it was doing no harm, he should have checked beforehand especially since he was working in the field he should have been able to know or at least get the information about what was going on if he checked.

Very likely an offence in some jurisdictions as "abstracting electricity" [1], which is a form of theft.

There may be no physical contact but induction still causes energy to be extracted from the line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstracting_electricity

I doubt anyone would prosecute over it, it would get thrown out of court because it's so petty? No worse than littering, etc.

depends on how much the energy stolen is worth?

Also probably depends whether you brag about it or not. If you wilfully undermine plausible deniability the network’s custodian may not be able to ignore you even if they don’t care because of the precedent it creates. If you start hewing close to civil disobedience you also bring more attention to yourself you would not otherwise warrant.

There is a housing estate near me that has these lines going right through it. I often wonder what the impact of that is on the people that live there.

The main advantage is that you don't need to pay for electricity for lighting.

Now the disadvantages: most electrical equipment and the human body are not build to function in a continous (as in always present) electromagnetic field.

> Now the disadvantages: most electrical equipment and the human body are not build to function in a continous (as in always present) electromagnetic field.

They literally are. The Earth has a continuous magnetic field, and has done for the entire history of the human race

yes and we'd better be grateful for it - it acts as a shield against cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun and the Van Allen belt.

You can't live without salt. Too much of it will kill you quickly. Why is it so hard to understand that both such statements can be true?

The statement was

"most electrical equipment and the human body are not build to function in a continous (as in always present) electromagnetic field"

That's a false statement.

The implication behind your statement is that the magnetic field from a power line is significantly more than the field from the earth.

Earths field strength is 25 to 65 μT [0]

A 400kV line according to this [1] says the maximum field is 4uT, maybe upto 6 for some tower designs. That's an order of magnitude less than the Earth's strength, although it is well above the typical daily variations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field

[1] https://www.emfs.info/sources/overhead/ohl-calculating/calcu...

> The Earth has a continuous magnetic field, and has done for the entire history of the human race

Yes. We're also getting fairly intense electromagnetic radiation around 12 hours per day. We call it "sunlight", and and the photons are far more energetic than anything coming from power line frequencies. E = hν, and ν for visible light is around 400-800 terahertz, while power line frequencies are 50-60 hertz.

There was a lot of talk about a link between people living near high voltage lines and leukaemia back in the 90s. There have been various studies which have a correlation, but I don't believe anyone has managed to find a causation.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7460-large-study-link...

The correlation is most likely that, power lines are unsightly and people don't want to live near them, so it's actually measuring socioeconomic status.

Some sort of electrostatic attraction of pollutants is another idea that gets floated.

The fields decrease in strength with distance, the square of distance for electric fields.

Your cellphone transmits at 1 watt and you put that at a distance of zero from your brain and reproductive organs.

If you are worrying about power lines you should worry about cell phones too

They said they collected 36J which is around 0.01 watt-hour, so this is not something you'd be using to power your house.

There's stories of farmers building coils to harvest power from powerlines to run their house or barn, but I'd be surprised if they were true unless the coils were built very close to the powerline.

https://www.industrytap.com/electromagnetic-harvesters-free-...

A really nice example. I tracked the data acquisition and fit an ordinary charging curve. For anyone interested, a 25 line script w/ data is here: https://pastebin.com/R0b1XSV0

Some insights:

- The peak DC voltage seems to be around 1.15 kV.

- The time constant is around 440 s. If you were to assume a simple RC-circuit with a constant voltage source (which it probably isnt), you would end at around 100 Ohm for the resistor.

- The start of the charging curve is not at the same time as in the video indicating that some voltage was already present from experiments before the video

Also, I am pretty sure it is not inductive coupling but capacitive because of several reasons:

- It doesn't look like a coax cable but more like an ordinary thick wire.

- I am pretty sure he didn't ground the cable at the far end and thus did not create a loop necessary for induction. And if he were, inductive coupling with ground in between would result in a very large voltage drop - If it were inductive: A single loop covering that little area would need way more turns than just one.

Those fences could be used for electrofarming. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2304360-can-electric-fi...

tl;dr

Electricity kills all bugs and insects good and bad, lowering pesticide use. They also increase water evaporation, forcing plants to grow faster.

So, what about the electricity affecting something like a cochlear implant, would this be considered an environmental impact for deaf ppl via pollution?

While I appreciate anyone experimenting with anything, I will caution that some jurisdictions consider any harvesting of waste energy from power transmissions lines to be a serious crime.

I would NOT do this in my hometown.

Can we create a lora network running along these? You've got free power and almost always line of sight.

Is it theft?

Probably, in some cases/jurisdictions.

But technically do you think this adversely effects the electricity company? If not, it's just overspill.

One of the comments says, it does effect the electric company (why shouldn't it, energy does not come out of nowhere) and they can meassure it.

"Velemu says: There was one case in Finland in The 90s, where someone did this to power their summer cottage. When Power company found, where the extra parasitic load came from, they sued the guy to hell and back again. This kind of load is actually actively measured by Power companies, since it is also used to find other failure modes on powerlines, and is easy to detect. Just don’t do it…."

Tim Hunkin's cartoon encyclopedia (from the 80s) mentions a conviction in Canada. https://www.rudimentsofwisdom.com/pages/power%20lines.htm

Some other cases mentioned here: https://www.industrytap.com/electromagnetic-harvesters-free-...

I think the main reason the electricity companies discourage this is the hazard it presents. The 'collector' is basically a current transformer, which means:

1. If the outputs of the 'collector' go open circuit (because the rectifier/capacitor/whatever dies) the voltage at those terminals is going to rise theoretically towards infinity - insulation breakdown and discharge will occur which is likely to result in a fire.

2. The current generated by the 'collector' is going to be proportional to the transmission line current; if a ground fault occurs on the line the current in the collector winding is going to spike up to some silly level; that will probably result destruction of whatever is connected to the collector outputs and subsequently a fire.

Imagine the alternate history political and legal mess if PG&E had found such a setup in proximity to the start of the fires back in '21 and '22.

I'm not an RF expert, but I believe this is a matter of near field vs far field.

In far field (like typical radio broadcasts), there's no "coupling" between the transmitter and receiver so the former just radiates its power and cannot distinguish whether it's being received.

In near field (RFID etc.), there is a coupling and the transmitter can definitely tell whether a receiver is present and absorbing the power.

Thus, and IANAL either, but IMHO harvesting from the near field definitely seems more like stealing, while the far field doesn't; is it stealing to effectively recover "waste energy" that would otherwise just be dissipated uselessly, and wouldn't cause any measurable increase in consumption from the power company?

This is exactly it. If you were to do this 'at scale' you'd end up having to generate more electricity to compensate for the losses, so it's clearly theft. Whether your grid coupling uses a capacitor or an inductor isn't relevant, clearly you are taking energy from the grid and is the thing that matters.

Indeed, and thus I stand by my original point, though downvoted!

The UK Wireless Telegraphy Acts made it illegal to listen to something that you weren't meant to by fiat without need of any proof of harm AFAIK, so there could easily be random laws in various places outlawing this extraction of power that has to be made up by other generation, even if small.

You generally aren't allowed to extract even small amounts of power from the system unmetered with a wire either, without specific permission.

Since they operated directly under the wires, I think this is clearly a near field.

Generating power from far fields does not seem likely to get any meaningful yield. I remember my father showing me how to build a passive radio receiver using a strong sender nearby and it worked. No other power source involved but you could listen to the (weak) output. So in theory possible, but not really useful.

The earliest radio receivers that I built as a kid were entirely passive, eg a tuned circuit and a diode, and the captured energy was enough to drive a ('crystal') earpiece. I was many many (tens/hundreds of) miles from the transmitters.

Technically, yes it does adversely affect the electricity company. It's not 'just overspill', that's how electricity moves from one place to another.

I suppose not. If my neighbour has a water sprinkler, it's not theft if I put a tree where it spills on my property. It's rather debatable if the strong electric fields are a disturbance to the environment and the power company should be obligated to insulate better, potentially leading to higher transmission efficiency.

What if your neighbor has a water sprinkler that is watering their own lawn, adjacent to yours, initially with no spillage, and you install a big array of fans on your property to induce air currents that cause it to start spilling over onto yours?

What would the fan be in this case?

I'm feeling like the initial analogy fit the premise better.

The fan is analogous to the antenna - it changes the RF landscape, such that a small amount of energy that would otherwise have stayed in the transmission line begins to flow into the antenna, similar to how the fan changes the air current landscape.

Is this similar to "transformer action"?

Wouldn't this be the same or greater if the fence is grounded?

Would this still be the case if the power lines were properly isolated?

It feels a lot like spillage to me, antenna or not, but I admit my emf is weak

From a physics perspective, the initial analogy doesn't hold at all though.

The antenna array is actually distorting the electromagnetic field and whatever is plugged to it is actively draining power from the power line. If there's no antenna the power line lose no energy through the field[1], it's not as if you were collecting lost power.

[1] in fact, you can even say that the energy is not carried in the cables themselves but in the air surrounding the cables!

Would that be the case if the power lines were properly isolated?

Define “properly isolated”. From the electric current perspective, the cables are properly insulated, and the insulating material is air. But here what's at stake is electromagnetic (EM) waves generated by the oscillating current flowing throw the cables, and while EM shields can reduce these I'm not sure it would even be possible to shield an entire cable in order to contain the field, and even if it was theoretically possible, it's almost certain that it wouldn't be realistic at the scale of a power grid.

The tree will grow roots to tap water closer to the source, ignoring property lines. I don't think fans are needed for the analogy to work.

> If my neighbour has a water sprinkler, it's not theft if I put a tree where it spills on my property

From a physics perspective It's not the same thing at all: with the water sprinkler, the water is lost no matter what for your neighbors. But with the electric field, there's no power loss unless you tap into it.

To get back to your water sprinkler example, it's as if your neighbors' hosepipe got trough your garden to get to his sprinkler: you can argue that this is a environmental disturbance to your garden, but that doesn't allow you to take water from the hosepipe for your own use.

It depends, if it is considered radiation then it is "landing" on your property; so you have the right to use it, same as the radio frequencies that pass by you are legal to listen in on, such as AM or FM radio...

It isn't the same at a technical level though. AM/FM is "far field" where you are many wavelengths away and are truly emitting radiation. This is "near field" where you are with a wavelength and are coupled with the source. This is actually drawing power.

Yes.

If you unscramble the tv signal entering your home are you stealing?

Also this is taking. This isn't power the gris would have lost anyway, you're coupling it on purpose increasing the leakage

To be clear I don't think unscrambling a TV signal is theft, Im just pointing out that it is a matter of law. The Tv provider didnt loos anything.

The grid provider, however, did loose something, namely they have to burn more fossil fuels to overcome the increased resistance on the line.

It is. Energy drain through induction, depends on conductivity of environment. By putting cables there, you increase energy loss on main line.

The same goes if the fence is there and grounded though?

I believe the intent matters. If you need a fence and you’re not trying to use the electricity then it is not theft. If your intent is to consume the power then it is theft.

Doing this kind of power harvesting off transmission lines is a standard Electric Power university course exam question for intro to transmission lines courses.

No more theft than putting a solar panel under a street light that's shining on your property.

Not true, either physically or legally.

The line losses are so huge anyway, this would barely even register. Heck a few large trees close to the power line would drain more energy than this. Considering such a trivial act as "theft" is completely ridiculous.

It’s interesting how confidently they asserted something plain wrong.

A more accurate analogy would be old style overhead drive shafts that powered many machines in large early industrial revolution factories.

This is equivilant to throwing an extra belt over the shift to power your own machine.

There's only so much power available and as more and more machines are driven there's less and less ommph to power more.

This is literally adding "drag" to the overhead power line and decreasing what reaches the end point of transmission.

It's not equivilant to scooping up photons that were being thrown on the ground anyway.

It's not possible to abstract any sizable amount of energy this way, unless the line is kilometers long. It's the scale of the "theft" that matters, which is so trivial compared to the inherent losses in the transmission line.

Is it OK to eat a grape for free in the grocery? Why or why not?

Yes, when done in good faith. This is customary like trying tastes of beer from a bartender when selecting the beer one wants a pint of. Draining electricity with an antenna is neither customary nor done in good faith…

Your analogy would be better if it were asking if it’s okay to walk through the store daily and take a couple grapes to add to my fruit basket at home.

You mean it is customary to place your mouth on beer tap and take a sip? Strange customs over there...

The more interesting legal analogy is probably water rights. If the state decides to protect the power line, it will be illegal to draw power without permission, regardless of the physical circumstances.

But again he is barely even abstracting a single watt of energy. To take legal action for such a trivial "offense" is beyond ridiculous.

You're very confused. And posting incorrect statements all over this thread. If you're excited about questions of legality, maybe you'd be interested in attending law school to learn more about the topic?

Enforcement and legality are separate things. Many people break the law under the assumption they will not be prosecuted. They're still breaking the law.

That's OK. But it's worth knowing because eventually enough of those small choices add up to something that does trigger the laws attention.

There's another reason this behavior might elicit enforcement: in many cases, failure to enforce property rights can become grounds for losing rights or being unable to enforce them in other contexts. So a large company may have an incentive to go after someone like this just to make sure that other people don't start doing more ambitious versions of this.

Your stance here is ridiculous. Common sense says it's wrong to arrest and/or prosecute people over such a trivial matter.

So much for all your supposed "justifications" for doing so. Have you completely lost all sense of proportionality here? Or has the legal system gone completely bonkers, then? Or are you trying to gaslight me?

We're talking about 0.1 watts of electricity being "stolen" at most.

That's so cool! I think it could absolutely be harvested. Of course, the government will probably pass a law or regulation that you can't stand or sit, or have any whatever close to the lines, but for now, I don't see really any reason why you can't do this. It's like any byproduct that is being actively discarded.

I want to try this and see if it could charge a battery.

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