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Comment by Sniffnoy | Hacker News Reader

Huh, is that legal? I mean I guess it is when the power company is the customer, as they talk about, but otherwise?

I'd assume otherwise you have to have a way for the drones to meter their usage and pay the power company. It will likely make power theft easier, but it seems entirely viable to have an account with the power company where you report "I drew X joules from line Y" and for them to bill appropriately.

The simplest might be for the drone company to act as an intermediary. They'd bill drone users for charging and have contracts with utilities. The drone company could do some authentication / DRM / etc. so that you'd basically have to jailbreak your drone to charge without paying.

Yes, I'm sure the markup would be large as a percentage, but for most customers the convenience would be worth it. Most of the customers are probably commercial and don't want to risk getting banned or sued.

That seems entirely unviable to me. Have you met… people?

“Trust me, bro!” is something I wish my power company would do, but they installed a meter instead.

Depends. When millions are on the line between companies, people are surprisingly willing to take a hand-created excel file as 'proof'. For example: https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-excel-g...

Feels like this is likely to be targeting government and major corporate clients, in which case they're probably in a strong place to negotiate agreements based on charge reported by the drone's on board software. Not to mention the utility companies themselves, who are mentioned as the initial market.

What's unviable about having the power company vet the thing that reports "I drew X joules from line Y" like they would vet any other meter?

Does the device report directly to the power company, or is that data aggregated and reported in some other format?

If it's the latter then hand editing is all it takes to create fraud.

Hand editing is all it takes to create fraud in all areas of business.

B2B transactions like this are handled fine with contracts and lawyers all the time, I doubt it would be an issue. In the worst case, the utility could own the recharging module on the drone, just like they own your power meter.

Unmetered electric service based on "trust me bro" is actually the default (at least in the US) for a huge variety of devices, like streetlights, cell towers mounted to electric poles, public irrigation systems, etc etc.

Almost every US utility has a "UM" process to self-assess an unmetered load's consumption and be billed. So, yes, it's not only viable but widespread.

> Unmetered electric service based on "trust me bro" is actually the default (at least in the US) for a huge variety of devices

I wouldn't talk too loud about this or you will ruin it for all of us. If I discover the street lights on my street mine botcoins I will blame you.

I mean, if I have to pay them by how much power I draw, I'm pretty glad they have a way to measure that, because I don't.

What's there alternative in this case? If I can land a drone on the power line and suck up some power, they can either charge me when I tell them I did it, or they can not charge me.

They'll use this narrative to fundraise and build. Then they'll build their own distributed charging infra that becomes a moat.

Presumably they'd be doing inspections for the power company, who probably don't care if some minuscule amounts of power are consumed directly during operations.

There is a not so subtle hint in the description that they were mainly inspired by military applications (Air Force, DARPA). Legality doesn’t matter when you’re in enemy territory.

Liability is probably the biggest issue, rather than using the energy. If it causes damage because it fails to connect properly, or if it has a trailing wire to pick up other phases (not actually connect to it but to pick up induction)

The drones heavier than 250g already must transmit remote id

You can install electric fencing beneath high voltage transmission lines and it will be energized for ‘free’.

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