Electricity Out of Thin Air Could Be The Next Big Power Source

Imagine building a tall 5000 foot tower and hanging 'seeds' from it to force electricity to 'flow' in the form of lighting to ultra capacitors on the ground to store it. Wow wouldn't that be something huh? And with Colorado is 'lightning alley' I bet we could power the lions share of things with that! Oh dream on people!

I'snt this the same exact thing Nikola Tesla was doing in the early 1900's before Edison killed his funding to build his wardenclyffe tower in Colorado? Tesla was truly a genius and a electrical wizard!

He didn't try this EXACT thing. In fact, he tried the opposite- he had a vision of using a monsterous Tasla Coil to put electricity INTO the air. From there, we could harness the energy radiating from the coil, not so much the elements in the air.

Using a Van de Graaff generator, it was proved many years ago in The University of Iowa Department of Physics that producing electricity on a large scale for public use was infeasible.

Now, does this explain the water droplet experiment done by Kelvin? Kelvin's Thunderstorm or water-drop electrostatic generator comes to mind when reading this.

Yeah, storms produce a lot of electricity, but they're the size of cities. Not sure how much a generator-size thing could do.

lightning discharges carry an insignificant amount of energy (high voltage, but a very small interval). So it seems unlikely that the energy of ambient atmospheric polarization would amount to much. They should've cited an optimum projection, because 'the benefits...could be substantial. A million volts and 1 Amp is a mega watt. You would have a hard time running a CFL on that sort of energy, let alone using it as a power source

While burning everything we can get our grubby hands on is not a great idea (yes, its fire and fire is cool but still its rather pre-stone age). I happen to like electricity better and getting it from wind and sun as I've been doing for 38 years now.
I think ideas like this one are good, BUT, not without substantial research first!
We still know very little about the workings of this planet, but enough to know its magnetic field is what is keeping life here without the solar winds stripping off the water, most of the atmosphere and keeping out radiation that would otherwise likely fry all of us.
I dont think it wise to mess with what could effect the earths magnetic field, until we are certain we wouldn't have an impact on it, short or long term.

the earths magnetic field is created by its motlen iron magnma core and the its rotation! This article presents a good idea, however gilje03 has a point it would be extremely difficult to extract any amount of useful voltage out of sparcley strewn about electrons on microscopic water droplets in the atmosphere, why do you think the milisecond of a charge (lightining) that does form only happens during very dense ocurrenses of atmospheric pressure, chalk this one up with physical matter teleportation and traveling to other galaxies, all good ideas but very veeery far down the road :)-

They say at the end, "panels that keep lightning from striking buildings". But, don't we already have lightning rods for that? Also, this is a great idea, it would be much like putting a lightning rod in the middle of a thunderstorm. by the way, it does not matter the size of the machine, for in electric storms there is not as much silica and aluminum phosphate as there could be in a generator that is designed specifically for this. So, we could create a lightning bolt as powerful as one found in a thunderstorm with a generator about the size of a large tool shed.