The biggest industry in the world is the one dealing with energy. Energy in all forms is a trillion dollar industry mainly supported by oil and petroleum. Petroleum is now at a peak price making lives difficult for all the non-fuel producing nations of the world.
People have tried many methods to produce a reliable renewable source of energy but have always met with one or the other limitations. Solar cells don't work without sunlight.batteries run out in hours instead of months or days and so on...
Consider the earth and the sky. The sky and earth have a huge potential difference between them. During lightning the charges are grouped together on the clouds and then when the potential is large enough to breakdown air you have a huge surge of electric current passing to the earth ; this is what produces the light ,the sound and a foul burning smell of air on fire!
For the record the breakdown voltage of air is a few thousand volts(>20000 volts). Normally there is a voltage difference of about a 1000 volts between the earth and the sky. This can be easily calculated assuming the earth and air to be a capacitor and then assume that the troposphere is a conductor due to ionisation by dear SUN and the earth is a storehouse of negative charge or electrons . the potential between the capacitors assuming an air dielectric, an ionosphere of an experimentally found conductivity and a distance of around 50 KM can be found using the expressions for the capacity of 2 concentric spherical capacitors.
Once we have the capacitance we have the electric field and this divided by the distance will give the voltage and this is around a 1000 volts.
What this means is that we are actually living inside a generator ! made up of 2 DC plates . If we were to somehow connect these plates together a discharge will occur and we would have controlled lightnings or discharge of energy , by using a high enough resistor we can limit the voltages and currents and use them for our uses.
Here is a simple plan for using this energy:
We will first build a balloon strong enough to withstand an ascent to a height of 30 Km. The balloon will ascend and take up a Conducting lightweight cable of very high strength , in particular the carbon nanotube would be an ideal starting point. Soon after we reach the ionosphere there would be a flow of electricity in the cable. This can be used to induce a current in another cable or used to heat a cable to produce electricity or used diredtly as a positive potential the earth will act as a cathode, effectively we will have an infinite power source!!
With the advent of present technologies we should be able to build such a thing within 5 years. This will be a solution to all our energy problems.
One Point that i have noticed is that we cannot have any flying object within a 30KM cone. this is for the safety of the aircraft as there could be a possible collission as the cable could move do to air and currents of the skies.
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