Growing whiskers on copper wires to use as capacitors is a very interesting idea. A few thoughts: (1) Is avoiding shorts in the insulating dielectric difficult

Growing whiskers on copper wires to use as capacitors is a very interesting idea. A few thoughts: (1) Is avoiding shorts in the insulating dielectric difficult? It seems like you'd need a very thin dielectric if you want benefits from the whiskers/nanowires, but a very thin layer could be hard from a reliability or voltage breakdown perspective. (2) If you wanted to use these for power lines, would the capacitance be an issue? I remember from my electrical engineering classes that the transmission line propagation is strongly affected by the balance between capacitance and inductance. Would you need much higher current to voltage ratios? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line (3) Even if this was built into power lines, I don't know if the capacitance boost would be very useful in terms of storing energy or smoothing out solar/wind power generation. You can only store power if you're willing to let your voltage vary significantly.