SpiralTruth

The world’s in a very strange place right now. On one hand, it feels like it might fall apart at any moment. Worldwide economic collapse, global warming, the always turbulent Middle East. On the other hand, everything seems possible. We’re starting to program DNA, we can engage in worldwide collaboration on any subject, and the U.S. has elected a smart President who believes in science. Wow. Maybe that’s why I ended up musing about alternative energy today. I was thinking about lightning. We’ve known for a long time that a single lightning strike could provide amazing amounts of electricity if we could only harness it. The main problem is that all the electricity is delivered at once. We could never charge a battery fast enough to store it. Meanwhile, hydrogen is a promising fuel source. You can get it from water and you get water as the exhaust when you burn it. The main problem with hydrogen is that you have to use so much energy to separate it from water via any of the known methods (electrolysis being one of them). Well then, wouldn’t it be possible to set up a system that uses a lightning strike to help convert a bunch of water into hydrogen, effectively using the gas as a very volatile quick-charge battery? You’d have to keep the hydrogen from exploding, of course. And there might be something about a lightning strike that makes it fundamentally unsuitable for the task. I’m much more passionate about art than I am about traditional science, and I have to confess that I have no desire to try and build a proof of concept. I did, however, find the idea intriguing enough to whip out the google-fu and see if anyone else had asked a similar question. Turns out, a lot of people had. Some of them are even trying to make a working prototype. Check out these links: (more…)