Ask HN: Practicality of harnessing geomagnetic fields for electrical generation?

4•keepamovin•12h ago

Years ago I would have asked this on the 'Overflows. Alas, those innocent days are long gone. I could always ask AI, but how can you know?

The Earth produces a moving magnetic field (small teslas, but large extent yes?). Moving magnetic fields produce electrical current, right? Could you add "geomagnetic power" to other clean/renewable sources with the right technical solution, or is it fundamentally impossible?

Comments

sloaken•8h ago

This seems like a very obvious solution. But of course I am ignorant on electricity generation and or the physics involved. I am hopeful someone will enlighten us.

gcheong•6h ago

It's apparently been done, but the amount generated was very small and it's not clear it could be scaled up to any useful amounts.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/earths-magnetic-field

keepamovin•5h ago

Excellent! I like it when experimentalists and technologists prove some significant set of theoreticians wrong!

sloaken•3h ago

Interesting read, thank you for finding it.

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Ask HN: Practicality of harnessing geomagnetic fields for electrical generation?

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Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving

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I changed my address, and TransferWise in two days will empty my account

Optimze It for My GPU

Ask HN: Practicality of harnessing geomagnetic fields for electrical generation?

Ask HN: Which cloud provider do you like best and why?

Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?

TermoSlack – A Terminal Based Slack Client

Ask HN: How do you verify front-end code in agentic LLM coding loops?

Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?

Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

Ask HN: Scheduling stateful nodes when MMAP makes memory accounting a lie

Color.io Is Going Offline

Why is OpenAI lying about the data its collecting on users?

A 27M parameter model beating LLMs on reasoning tasks

Ask HN: Should account creation/origin country be displayed on HN profiles?

Ask HN: Type 1 Hypervisor for use on a laptop?

Can Management Be Outsourced?

Ask HN: Do AIs reply with numerous em dashes to save money somehow?

Ask HN: What is the purpose of all these AI spam comments?

Vibro-Braille for Deaf-Blind

Ask HN: Why don't closed captions boldface words that are likely to be misheard?

Enterprise security can be messy: Building a Security-Aware Culture

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