Lightning And Traffic Lights

Do you know what the ultimate in energy is? We often see it when there is a storm. It is lightning.

There is a tremendous amount of energy in a lightning bolt. Currents of air knocks some of the electrons out of atomic orbitals of atoms in the air. A lightning bolt is between the cloud and the ground, or between two clouds. It is a flow of negatively charged electrons to correct a charge imbalance.

Why can't we harness the power of lightning? I have been wondering about this since I was a child. If we can harness the lateral movement of the air, by windmills, then why can't we harness the vertical movement of the air, by lightning?

It is not difficult to get lightning to strike, a metal tower that gives it the route of least resistance to the ground is all that is needed. The saying that "lightning never strikes twice in the same place" has no truth to it whatsoever. Although lightning sometimes goes from the cloud to the ground, and sometimes vice versa.

To harness it's tremendous power we would need a heavy duty capacitor structure that would temporarily store the electrical energy. Then the current would pass through a chemical vat that would act as a chargeable battery. The electrical energy of the lightning bolt would then be stored as chemical energy, and released at will as useful power.

The capacitor and the battery would decrease the conductivity of the metal tower to the ground. It would be necessary for it to still be by far the path of least resistance for the lightning bolt to get to ground. 

This structure would have to be wired in preparation for the lightning to be either from cloud to ground, or vice versa. A one way bolt of lightning is direct current. One way that it could be turned into alternating current is to have two batteries, one for each direction of the bolt, and alternate release of current between the two.

There is no reason for us not to be harnessing the tremendous power in lightning.

Another issue is traffic lights. Have you ever thought about the vast amount of energy that is wasted while idling at traffic lights? Not to mention time and how it is adding to global warming.

There is so much discussion about "smart" technology nowadays. Traffic Lights are about as dumb as a technology as there is. A hammer is smarter than a traffic light because at least a hammer isn't wasteful. How many times have you seen ten cars waiting at a red light while there are no cars on the green light? 

Traffic lights are an example of what I refer to as being "technically forward but system backward". A technology is set up on a basic system. We keep making technical progress but then years later we are still using the primitive original system on which the technology was based, and this is what is holding the whole technology back. Another example is the primitive ASCII system of computer encoding.