Originally Posted by makeinu
I hope that this story isn't true. I'm an electrical engineer and I can assure you that it doesn't work like that. What the farmer did is analogous to stealing water by poking a hole in a water reservoir and claiming that the water was just going to waste by leaking into the reservoir. The electricity wasn't going to waste, it was just being stored in the air.
Well, I haven't researched it. It's a story that was told to me by an engineering major at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology back in the 70's.