I was reading some news story this afternoon about approval for solar power stations being put on hold.
That got me thinking of how solar panels shade whatever’s below them, which may not be good for the vegetation or critters underneath.
That got me thinking how great it would be if there were solar collectors which could float in the sky, wirelessly discharging their electrical power.
Then I realized with a laugh that I was describing clouds!
Clouds collect not only solar radiation but they are really huge batteries of static electricity, which as you know becomes lightning. That got me poking around for ways of harnessing the electrical power of lightning. Most approaches stop with the realization that the extremely high voltages would vaporize most conductors. Also, lightning is direct current electricity: the kind that can’t be stepped down with transformers. There’s also the storage issue: its extremely difficult to store electricity with any efficiency. It has an inherently short shelf life.
The answer to this may be to use lightning to split water molecules. Rather than directly feed a bank of batteries or capacitors, a bolt could be channeled into a large body of water where its electricity would create hydrogen and oxygen gases through electrolysis. The resulting hydrogen could be captured for use in fuel cells and the like (and oxygen for other purposes).
Some hobbyists claim to have made this happen on a smaller scale with tabletop Van De Graaff generators but I’d have to see it to believe it. Even so, I think it might be a fun problem to try to solve.
You’re going to need a flux capacitor.
Actually there are lots of places already covering stuff below it. Think of all the house tops in the world. If the power companies kept storage in the grid to gather excess capacity, then you would have a place to put all the power that just runs to ground keeping the power grid up. Maybe “storage” is what a flux capacitor is?
An NC State professor gave a talk at a DFMA meeting a few years ago about putting solar panels in space and transmitting the electricity down to the ground wirelessly. So, it’s not a pipe dream.