I mentioned my sky antenna 'free energy' device recently. Last night's amazing thunderstorms (S.Wales) got me thinking (uh oh, I hear you say). For several hours, we had lighning in the sky every 5-10seconds. Haven't seen one like that for several years.
Benjamin Frankin is one of those amazing olde worlde inventors - as well as discovering the true nature of lightning and whirlwinds, he invented lightning rods, the wood burning stove(!), bifocal lenses and speedometers.
Franklin's famous experiment, flying a kite in a thunderstorm (VERY DANGEROUS - in case it gives any younger members ideas!), always captured my imagination. According to Wiki and others, an average thunderstorm can carry 10million kWh of energy, and larger storms can carry as much as 1000x this much energy. Clearly a lot. At any one moment there are 2000 storms across our planet.
If there was a way of harnessing this power, then a significant new form of renewable energy would be realised. In practical terms, the difficulty is severe, however, there is another approach:
"According to Christian and McCook (1), most of the electrical charge transferred to the atmosphere during storms is transmitted to the ionosphere, from where it leaks back to earth as a steady, 500,000-Volt fair-weather current of about 2 pico Amps per square meter of ground area. That works out to just 0.01 micro Watts per square metre or 10 kiloWatts (kW) per square kilometer." [think there's a mistake in that calculation...]
(1) Christian, Hugh J. and Melanie A. Mc.Cook. (Undated) Lightning detection from space: A lightning primer. http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov/lightning/primer.html. So if you happen to own 250acres of land, you've got 10kW of electrical power raining down, constantly. Or if you have 600m2, like me, then you've only got 6W.
