Lightning Power

Of course, in the pursuit of leaving behind those pesky, dirty fossil fuels, new ideas for powering the globe are coming out of the woodwork. Some of those ideas are very sound, and some are very foolish (I read an article about creating a twenty kilometer tall tornado in a nuclear plant cooling tower to power wind turbines and cool the plant at the same time). But there is one major power source that seems to have been largely neglected- until now: Lightning.

You may remember lightning from such memorable instances as: getting struck by it, getting the crap scared out of you by it, and trying to count the different colors of it (yes, lightning comes in many colors). You might not remember it, though, as pure electricity. You know, that stuff we power our civilization with? Well, someone thought of that, and came up with a plan to harvest it.

The plan would involve hundreds of three foot metal poles, specifically designed to capture the energy produced by a lightning strike. These poles, placed in areas of high thunderstorm activity, would be able to power significant portions of the country. As it was put, one mid-west storm has the potential to power the entire United States for up to twenty minutes. That is a lot of power.

Of course, there are probably drawbacks to the idea, and limitations, but it is still just an idea, and such things have yet to be hammered out or even discovered. But is our goal of a renewable planet, having such powerful energy free of cost or side effect in production would be a giant step forward indeed.

The article about lightning can be found here: EcoGeek.org