I've heard of that sort of thing before. It takes a while for the power company to locate the power drain. But once located they tried to make the farmer pay for the power he's taken. He refused since he was not connected to the power lines. A judge agreed with him. He wasn't tapping into the power lines. Arguing went on for a while before the power company decided it was cheaper to allow him to take the electricity than it was to moving the power lines some few hundred feet.

He said 240KVAC line. Charging a cap through a bridge rectifier - WOW! That should go up to 339,360 volts DC on that cap; the cap that's rated for 1.2KV. Glad he stopped before reaching the breakdown point on the cap. That'd probably have hurt. Would have liked to see the screwdriver after he burned it with the cap.

 

The voltage generated by a conductor by the magnetic field can provide useful currents, but any capacitive effects are rather small.

 

That's the worst "Air-Core-Transformer" I've ever seen !!!
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Rounding error, on rounding error losses, for the power company. As he said, very low power levels.
A 10W solar panel delivers thousands of times more power.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806051303299.html

 

I was surprised the guy knew as much as he did. Made me nervous watching the guy. I did chortle a bit when he showed his joules calculations on a Dunkin Donuts site? Could maybe be harnessed to make an "electric" cattle fence. Apparently, he had already had some discussions with the power company about just what their easement entailed him to be allowed to do. Not that they were probably paying him any attention when he did.