[ale] Off the Wall

[Irv Mullins]

On Wednesday 19 December 2001 06:36 am, Lee wrote:
> Ok..speaking of all this lightning and power consumption..I have something
> I've been wondering about. I think a great new power source would be if it
> were somehow possible to capture lightning and store this on "mondo sized"
> batteries for distribution under more a "controlled" enviroment. I'd
> imagine the capacitors would have to be of pretty good size as well, and a
> by-pass for any overflow that would almost certainly occur.
>
> Am I even close to being onto something here,or should I let these paint
> fumes air a bit longer before working so long in the office :-)

Shades of Ben Franklin. 

Actually, ol' Ben was extremely lucky that he wasn't fried to a crisp during 
that kite experiment. 

Other than the difficulty of finding volunteers to fly the kite, the other 
big problem is that you would need batteries or capacitors which were pretty 
well insulated - several zillion volts can really arc.  That means some 
*thick* insulation, which means big batteries. More or less the size of 
downtown Pittsburgh, say.. Also, you'd have to use something bigger 
than #12 wire to connect the batteries - NASA measured a current flow of 
100,000 amperes when lightning struck a launch tower at the cape some
years ago. 

Then, there's the problem of actually finding the batteries, etc, after 
lightning has hit them.

Regards,
Irv

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