Is it 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.
I'm feeling like the initial analogy fit the premise better.
It feels a lot like spillage to me, antenna or not, but I admit my emf is weak
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also this is taking. This isn't power the gris would have lost anyway, you're coupling it on purpose increasing the leakage
The grid provider, however, did loose something, namely they have to burn more fossil fuels to overcome the increased resistance on the line.
"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…."
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.
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?
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.
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.