RE: Let's Decentralize Electricity- Home Atmospheric Electricity Collectors Could Soon Be Ours
This is a really hard subject.
Capacitors... Tesla called them condensors.
And that is a proper term for them.
Even the super capacitors do not really have "capacity".
So, electrical engineers do not have any clue about electricity.
Now, what can electricity do? Should you be afraid?
How about a technician working for a phone company. His metal rimmed glasses slipped from his face as he was working on a battery bank (only 42volts) and the arc caused by the falling glasses melted his face.
The first thing to note about atmospheric electricity is that it isn't one voltage. A wire, ran from one building to another can have hundreds of volts potential. Thus, such wires have to be coupled through transformers.
The next thing about atmospheric electricity is that it is not from the sky.
The earth and sky(s) are a condensor (capacitor)
The last thing i will talk about is frequency. What you will create is not a DC circuit. And, it is not electricity as we are taught.
There was a guy who built a box, that was mostly a couple of transformers. Connecting an aerial and a ground to it, after tuning, he could light a light bulb. However, a light bulb place in the aerial wire would not glow. But, removing that light bulb would turn off the other bulb.
I would be excited if I could get a little flicker out of a light bulb by such an experiment, especially since I know virtually nothing about electricity, yet!
I still have to look up words like 'capacitor', but in a way I'm glad I didn't learn all the wrong terms and ideas, I have a lot of 'what if's' and questions because I don't know a thing about it.
I did figure out that it doesn't come from the sky, but is a flow between the earth and the atmosphere, I was trying to be careful with such wording, and since, as you noted, there is only one wire involved, it gets weird right away as far as 'current' goes. Even 'ions' are a new thing for me to conceive, so I'm oblivious to how this might work so far. I'm glad you commented, I'd hoped that a builder of castles would have some input on this topic.