3 ms·

> Even on sunny days with cloudless skies, the air carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every meter above the ground. This is interesting. Is there any w

• blattimwind 8y ago
  Electric field (in this case the ambient e-field of 100-300 V/m without clouds; up to a dozen or so kV/m when you're under a thunderstorm) does not imply power. Cf. static electricity.
• jws 8y ago
  You can see videos of people doing this. It is very low power, but they can turn their corona motors. e.g. https://youtu.be/qhXxSAv6rMg https://youtu.be/qhXxSAv6rMg
• wiml 8y ago
  The impedance is ridiculously high; there isn't very much power available at all. Even just to get enough current to sense accurately can be difficult. Some googling suggests that even if you somehow extracted all the current from the entire planetary atmosphere's charge-separating processes you'd get maybe a gigawatt.
• kwhitefoot 8y ago
  Not really, the energy density is fairly low. Except during thunderstorms of course. Shoudn't be too hard to check. Get ten metres of rigid plastic pipe and ten metres of insulated wire bared at the ends so that you can measure the voltage between the top and ground. Set it up vertically at least 20 m from everything else. Measure the voltage between top and bottom with a good quality high impedance voltmeter. Now add another ten metre length of wire and a resistor to complete the circuit and use some of the power. Measure the voltage again. The voltages and the resistance allow you to calculate the equivalent impedance of the source. I'd be very surprised if no one has already done this and probably in a much more sophisticated fashion.