One of the most incredible forces of nature is lightning and it doesn’t only happen here on Earth, we know there are lightning storms on Jupiter, Mars, and other planets, significant ones. The trade of electrons due to the friction of the atmosphere against the Earth is what causes this, and there is also a lot of energy at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere where it is brushing up against space. All that energy is a force to be reckoned with – but I ask; could it be a force to be collected and reused – yes, I am talking about harvesting and converting that energy for electricity use by humans. Let’s talk, shall we?

There was an interesting article in Homeland Security News titled; “Grid-scale batteries for storing renewable energy have large carbon footprint,” which was published on March 11, 2013 that stated;

“Stanford scientists have developed a novel way to calculate the energetic cost of building large batteries and other storage technologies for the electrical grid. The found that the fossil fuel required to build these technologies could negate some of the environmental benefits of installing new solar and wind farms.”

Why bother collecting the little amount of energy we can generate with wind power, if we could collect lightning? I mean the amount of energy difference is so significant it makes wind power look minuscule in comparison. Some lightning bolts have enough power, if collected to run the city’s electricity needs for days on end – imagine that. How might we go about collecting it, you ask? Well, let me throw a few ideas out there for you engineering minds, and then you work out the details from there.

First, I suggest that we set up some underground chambers that we can use to compress gas. These chambers would have outlet valves when the pressure gets too high. Once the pressure has reached its near maximum, the remaining pressure would go into other tanks, once all the tanks were full the lightning rods on the end of the giant piston would divert the energy to a grounding cable and into the Earth. The pressure would be allowed to escape as needed to spin a turbine to generate electricity.

The force of the lightning bolt pushes the piston down compressing the gas, and we release it as needed to generate the power demand we need on the electrical grid. Okay so, I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.