Anaxagoras
Posts: 3086
Joined: 5/9/2009
From: Eire
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ORIGINAL: Real0ne
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ORIGINAL: mnottertail
Yeah, now we are back to earth batteries, a large fail for power enough to run houses and hospitals.
And of course with farms of 60 mile high antennas, we wouldnt need to rely on something as chimeral as lightning. We would just use the difference in potential between the earths atmosphere and the ground (little tesla for you there).
Now, a typical lightning strike, so you dont get too far out in the opium induced hazes, would light a 100w lightbulb about three months, not houses for years....
So, we now have about around 10-200 Ka riding on a billion volts or so (and assuming we have gear to capture 100% of the strikes with 100% efficiency and store it....oh, oh, already we got trouble) and these great mats capturing at ground, will not ground and kill everyone for miles around......
Now, you are talking about using this electromagnetic radiation (some spectrum of it) as a carrier for distribution globally. This concerns me, the very air we breath lit up with billions of volts flying around in great williwaws, and forcing everyone on the planet to be encased in a good foot of rubber from head to toe, never mind forget television, radio, cell phones, or any form of communication and the impossible task of retrofitting the electrical wire and switchgear in your house to withstand such a bizzare state of affairs.
I guess that would say, in essence, fuck the cows and sheep and horses, hey?
So, I belive the equation is thus, so far:
A ---> (physics is ignored here):: B ----> (miracle occurs here):: C ---> (planet is vaporized here) :: D ----> (beer is cooled here).
Did I miss any steps?
once it is converted it is easily stored, that and its alredy stored in the upper atmosphere.
No it isn't. We are talking about very very high voltages with very little current which is extremely costly to convert with immense transformers.
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under ideal conditions you would want positive lightning but this device is ac and operates on both.
if we take the 16 milion lightning strikes in the world and add them up at the minimal numbers you gave above you would light that 100 watt light bulb somewhere between 2 to 3 million years.
Do you have any idea how many homes there are, and how many light bulbs there are in each home? 
Here is some medicine to get you out of your "haze": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Harvesting_lightning_energy
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A technology capable of harvesting lightning energy would need to be able to rapidly capture the high power involved in a lightning bolt. Several schemes have been proposed, but the ever-changing energy involved in each lightning bolt render lightning power harvesting from ground based rods impractical - too high, it will damage the storage, too low and it may not work.[126] According to Northeastern University physicists Stephen Reucroft and John Swain, a lightning bolt carries a few million joules of energy, enough to power a 100-watt bulb for 5.5 hours. Additionally, lightning is sporadic, and therefore energy would have to be collected and stored; it is difficult to convert high-voltage electrical power to the lower-voltage power that can be stored.[125]
In the summer of 2007, an alternative energy company called Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc. (AEHI) tested a method for capturing the energy in lightning bolts. The design for the system had been purchased from an Illinois inventor named Steve LeRoy, who had reportedly been able to power a 60-watt light bulb for 20 minutes using the energy captured from a small flash of artificial lightning....
According to Dr. Martin A. Uman, co-director of the Lightning Research Laboratory at the University of Florida and a leading authority on lightning,[128] a single lightning strike, while fast and bright, contains very little energy, and dozens of lighting towers like those used in the system tested by AEHI would be needed to operate five 100-watt light bulbs for the course of a year. When interviewed by The New York Times, he stated that the energy in a thunderstorm is comparable to that of an atomic bomb, but trying to harvest the energy of lightning from the ground is "hopeless".[127]
Another major challenge when attempting to harvest energy from lighting is the impossibility of predicting when and where thunderstorms will occur. Even during a storm, it is very difficult to tell where exactly lightning will strike.[123]
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"That woman, as nature has created her, and man at present is educating her, is man's enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion." (Venus in Furs)
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