Lightning Power: It's not just for Flux Capacitors anymore

Another Midwest boy doing himself good;

Makes the ol chest swell with pride I am telling you. LeRoy, bet I herd that name 20 times when I was there, how can this loose?

With those new capacitors in place the world is gonna change and soon. In an old story they were called "Bottles" and could be charged from Atomic sources.

Who Knew that stuff could be harnessed? Took a stubborn no quitter from the Midwest to figure it out.

Wooh there, lets not put the cart before the horse. The idea to try and store and harness lightning has been around since, well the invention of electricity. Now after looking at the media articles and glossing over all the puns <cringe> the little information that is available indicates the use of large capacitor banks and a converter to convert the very high voltage dc into ac (with the initial demo just using a generator to simulate sparks).

I for one am interested but it does not appear that he has done anything to solve the biggest problem of all, how to safely capture and store extremely short pulses of incredibly high voltage and current (some sort of new capacitor design perhaps?). I have a pic from his patent but it is a little blurry. Current capacitors (including Supercapacitors and pulse capacitors) just cannot cut it!

If anyone knows of any good links to LeRoy's proposition (or his patent number) then please let us know. Come on, am I missing something here, has the breakthru we engineers have been waiting for finally about to arrive?

Ol' Ben Franklin will roll over in his grave. His Leyden Jar has risen to new heights.

" if LeRoy's idea could be expanded and implemented over a large area,"

Now that is a mighty big if. Of course that is the trick, having fast moving collectors/antennas to get to each and every lightning strike BEFORE it occurs!

Come back in and year or three when LeRoy has that minor detail figured out.

Oh Oh! Just noticed we are talking SCI FI Tech here. It may be thirty three years or more.

The Idea might work if no one gets in his way and let's him think it out. A whole world of things have happened that way, one must out stubborn the Gods themselves once in a while to get those secrets.

Hope he makes a pile of money while he is at it.

I wonder if there might be a way to get that electrical power out of the Cu-nimb in a 'softer' way than the lightning bolt delivers. I read somewhere about firing model rockets trailing a thin wire into the cloud and triggering a bolt.

So maybe a really tall tower, or a cable dangling from a super high altitude balloon, could be used to 'bleed' the energy before it gets so excited it arcs to earth or vice/versa.