I suspect we are talking about 24 watts as compared to eg 1000 megawatt 500kv line. This is seven orders of magnitude difference. Totally lost in the noise.
Effective immediately, all airspace below 500 feet near powerlines is now classified as Class M airspace (for money). If your registered drone is detected nearby, you’ll be charged per second.
This is again technically plausible but ethically irrelevant.
It's like the fallacy in: "It's OK for people to steal goods from that store, because the parent-company is very big and one theft won't even show up on their monthly financials and they've got spoilage and breakage too."
> I suspect we are talking about 24 watts
The video demonstration shows 50 watts of input.
Napkin-math: Suppose one drone uses 1000 (battery) watts flying around, and does so for 4 hours each day for a month. (Made possible by an improved version of this research that charges at 200w.) That's 4 kWH. The electrical price is $0.20/kWh.
That means siphoning $24/month for one drone. That's not a casual "keep the extra penny", that's a Netflix Premium subscription.