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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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]
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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Total control of the process is entirely achievable, IMO. Artificial lightning (low energy pair production in water) is the energy black swan hiding in plain sight. It's a generation and storage solution all-in-one, perhaps the last one we'll need.https://twitter.com/i/moments/1083432417581559808 …
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