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Comment by Kab1r | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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