Harnessing atmospheric electric discharge, lightning.

[talsor]

I can not argue with that and this is what the capacitors are designed for , it is a temporary storage , which does not last long when the main power source is disconnected . Based on my uderstanding , Capacitor are nothing more than a pair of conductors separated by a dielectric , so I do not know who could that be converted to a permenant storage device .

There is no necessity to have a permanent storage bro. Capacitors discharge energy as soon as they got disconnected from the charging source, but this occurs gradually and if the amount of energy stored within the capacitor was something considerable therefore we could utilize it immediately in spite of gradual discharging.

Thank Kak Londoner for posting this topic , I hope you can keep it up .

Kak Quaere Verum
is there one application that capacitor are used as a power supply (like a battery ) without constantly recharging it ?

[Quaere Verum]

Kak Quaere Verum
is there one application that capacitor are used as a power supply (like a battery ) without constantly recharging it ?

I think the question is not whether there are any applications using capacitors without constant recharge or not. Capacitors store energy very good and are almost the best choice for the short time usages. But in our instance the matter is what if we could only harness the lightning energy by means of a capacitor (since it could be charged instantaneously-by a lightning strike for example, as opposed to a normal battery), that is to say would capacitors be able to give the energy back or they would let us down? And to my meager knowledge they would not be letting us down.

[Londoner]

is there one application that capacitor are used as a power supply (like a battery ) without constantly recharging it ?

Sorry I can not control myself. I must make some commnets about this.

There are batteries, which contain chemical elements to generate electricity. These sort of batteries can not be recharged.
There are also batteries, which have to be recharged like car and mobile phone batteris. These are actually not batteries but a sort of capacitors.

[Quaere Verum]

And to my meager knowledge they would not be letting us down.

I think I've got to amend myself. Seemingly the current capacitors cannot tolerate such a high voltage which exists in each lightning. Thus they are almost unlikely to store lightning energy. Nonetheless the improved high energy density capacitors might be able to accomplish such a task of harnessing lightning energy in the future.

[Londoner]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning# ... ing_energy
Harvesting lightning energy
Since the late 1980s there have been several attempts to investigate the possibility of harvesting energy from lightning. While a single bolt of lightning carries a relatively large amount of energy, this energy is concentrated in a small location and is passed during an extremely short period of time (milliseconds); therefore, extremely high electrical power is involved.[122] It has been proposed that the energy contained in lightning be used to generate hydrogen from water, or to harness the energy from rapid heating of water due to lightning.[123]
A technology capable of harvesting lightning energy would need to be able to capture rapidly the high power involved in a lightning bolt. Several schemes have been proposed, but the low energy involved in each lightning bolt render lightning power harvesting from ground based lightning rods as impractical.[124] According to Northeastern University physicists Stephen Reucroft and John Swain, a lightning bolt carries a few million joules of energy, enough to power a 100-watt bulb for 5.5 hours. Additionally, lightning is sporadic, and therefore energy would have to be collected and stored; it is difficult to convert high-voltage electrical power to the lower-voltage power that can be stored.[123]
In the summer of 2007, an alternative energy company called Alternate Energy Holdings (AEH) tested a method for capturing the energy in lightning bolts. The design for the system had been purchased from an Illinois inventor named Steve LeRoy, who had reportedly been able to power a 60-watt light bulb for 20 minutes using the energy captured from a small flash of artificial lightning. The method involved a tower, a means of shunting off a large portion of the incoming energy, and a capacitor to store the rest. According to Donald Gillispie, CEO of AEH, they "couldn't make it work," although "given enough time and money, you could probably scale this thing up... it's not black magic; it's truly math and science, and it could happen."[125]