eli5 why can’t we harness earths magnetic field to create electricity?

521 viewsOtherPlanetary Science

From my understanding when a magnetic field passes through a coil it generates a current. What prevents us from being able to create a coil that can harness earths magnetic field to generate a current/electricity? Would it need to be huge? Is the earths magnetic field to low? Idk I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and I just don’t understand why it wouldn’t work.

In: Planetary Science

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Static Magnetic fields itself don’t create energy. You need changing magnetic fields. The natural changes in earth magnet field are very tiny and slow and you can not draw any meaningful amount of energy from it.

Just putting solar cells on the ground produces much more electricity and is much easier, than anything we could do with the earth magnetic field.

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