Saw some lightning today and ran the numbers — a bolt of lightning only has about $30 worth of electricity in it. I was thinking that an aluminum smelting plant might be an effective place to put lightning strikes to use, but no.
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Hard to get a rocket like that for les than $30
Yeah. A friend told me (long ago, so my memory may be wrong) of using balloons and a conducting trailing wire to do something like this in the New Mexico desert, getting strikes over and over in the same spot. I guess that'd be a lot cheaper(?) [cont]
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I think I know one of those guys. Issue was time constants. Tough to extract any useful WORK.
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They were doing it mostly to study lightning, as I recall.
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What makes me wonder at remembering it right is the detail about the desert. Cumulonimbus clouds are a great generator of a potential difference. I guess you can have a large potential difference without such a cloud, but I wonder if I'm misremembering some piece.
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That’s all good, big capacitor. But you want it to discharge SLOWER.
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Reminds me of a fellow that used a kite :)
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