Lightning as a Source of Electricity

Here's a pretty good discussion of the topic:

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/2701/Electricity-From-Lightning

Why, are you planning to create your own Frankenstein's monster?

LOL

No, but wouldn't it be cool to harness nature's generated electricity for our use?

Or maybe artificially create lightning to harness its electricity?

Maybe another alternative is a gym?

let me explain:)

Allot of people go to the gym to use machines with a certain load on it. If we replace that load and connect that same machine and couple all the machines in the gym via a mechanism to a man powered generator. We can have a nice little source of electrical power. The more efficient the gym is the more power the gym will produce.

What it seems that is truly needed here is a method of producing room temperature super-conductors. It has been shown that a superconducting coil of wire will hold a charge for a very long time. Even a small charge, like say nine volts, can be held for days.

Here is my thought: If you create a large grid work, not like our current electrical "grid", but an actual grid, and at the juncture points place large superconducting coils as storage for the lightning strikes, the coils (we are speaking of actual power stations here not just a few coils, but several dozens at each point) would hold and store, temporarily, the charge.

The grid, of course would be the size of a nation, and would collect the lightning strikes from a huge area. And those countries that had an excess of electricity could sell their excess to other countries. There would be no power loss of course if the grids were superconductors, so countries like say Indonesia could sell power to Nigeria or any other low rain/lightning nation.

And if the superconductors were also heat conductive (which according to the current theories they should be) then any area of the world experiencing too much heat (Arctic, Antarctic, if you follow the Global warming theorists) could be cooled by dropping superconductors to say the deepest ocean trenches, or by balloons raised to the Stratosphere. I will admit those last thoughts just occurred to me so those may have some serious flaws.

However I may be wrong on all counts. Ideas, feedback, suggestions?

Regards Dragon