How do I use Energy?

“How do I use Energy?”….This is a Question for which I was asked to answer in Quora by someone. When I first read it, I was like “What does he mean? How does anyone use Energy!
Should I explain to him What Energy is? Should I ask him for some more details? Or is he stupid!”.
‘Should I give him the classic definition of Energy: Energy is the capacity to do work.
For example, for a ball to reach up to some height, it requires a certain amount of energy. So when you are throwing a ball up in the air, what you would do is to give it the energy it requires’.
‘The ways you can use Energy are many. Or inversely I can say, To do any work, you will require something called energy. And before knowing how to use energy or maybe while understanding how to use energy one must also learn the conversion of energy from one form to other.”
So on I didn’t know what to answer. I just left it aside.
A day later I was going through the questions which I am asked to answer, the ones I didn’t answer immediately.
There are questions which I didn’t want to answer. For example, there is this question, “If I throw a ball at 60 mph at an angle of 30 degrees from so and so height, When will reach the ground and so?”. That is the sort of question, I believe, they should ask their teacher to solve and show. Then there is this question, ” How to raise money if I have a solar power plant which produces so and so amounts of power? and Cost of unit is so and so”. Well I am not a business planner.

Amidst these questions, I found it again, the question “How do I use Energy?”.
Since I was feeling kind of bored, I opened it in a new tab. In the description part, there is something like this “During Rain, in clouds, the charge is moving. How to use it?”

I understood what he is trying to ask, or maybe I thought what his question was. So I edited the question and description a bit and changed it to.

After giving it a thought for a few minutes, I started to come up with a simple idea.
You can see my answer to that question here.

So the idea is to use a capacitor to store the charge that is discharged through lightning.

What is a capacitor?
A capacitor is a pair of conducting plates that are put parallel to each other. Now if we place two such parallel places in a closed circuit with a voltage across them as shown below.

So as you are seeing one plate acquires a positive charge and the other plate acquires a negative charge. Now even if you remove the battery, the capacitor stores that charge unless discharged.

I will just write down my train of thoughts.

So What if we connect one plate(let's say plate1) to the ground and pass charge Q to the other plate(plate2)?
Plate2 gets charged and is now having charge Q.
Any charged body induces an opposite charge on the nearby conducting plate.
So this will induce a charge -Q on the plate1, Ground takes the remaining Q charge from the plate1. Voila! Now we have to isolate the capacitors immediately. Cause the same ground will try to discharge the plate1 again, the instant we stop giving charge to the plate2.

So As I explained in my answer, All we have to do is catch the lightning using antennas.
Any spiked conducting material acts as an antenna. It’s better if our antenna is more spiked than others. The 3 ideas are presented here.

Idea 1-Franklin kite technique

Remember Benjamin Franklin and his crazy illustration of showing that Lightning is nothing more than the discharge of charge from clouds.
He flew kites attached to silk threads while it is raining. Once the silk thread got wet, it becomes conducting and is big and close enough to act as an antenna. Once the lightning strikes the kite, the charge in it is conducted all along the thread because it’s wet and conducting now.
At the other end, they attached a key and the key is tied to a metal wire, the wire now connected to some sort of capacitor. And they hold the key using a dry silk thread. The capacitor they used is the Leyden Jar. So the charge is passed on through the key and wire to the Jar and stored in it.

In the pic, You can see the kite, key, Leyden Jar and the genius Benjamin Franklin. (I know it’s not a photograph). So as you see Benjamin harnessed the charge in clouds.

Idea 2- The Eiffel Technique

In this idea, I would like to just use the Eiffel tower as an antenna. As far as I can see I don’t Eiffel tower is built using conducting material. So I will just add a spiked rod on the top of it.
Or rather here we will use all the already heights available and build antenna’s above them and increase the probability of catching the lightning.

So again I will attach the antenna to a capacitor. And tadaa we get the charge stored.

Idea 3: Flying Balloons

The flying balloon ideas are sort of my tiny creations. Maybe somebody got this idea already and maybe there were prototypes of them. They just occurred to me while answering the question on Quora.
Fly balloons carrying capacitors. These balloons come in two varieties. One made of non-conducting material and the other made of conducting material.

The first one is shown in the below pic:

Literally I posted this image along with my answer on quora. So this balloons fly just below clouds and they have two antennas, one facing up and the other down. So the lightning strike the above antenna charges up the capacitor and passes along the down antenna. Once the lightning strikes, the balloon is supposed to blast and the charged capacitor which is neatly rugged falls to the ground. You can add a tiny GPS locator so that you can collect it once it falls.

The second one keeps floating, It is rather not spherical shaped.
So it has upper half conducting shell and there is only single antenna facing towards the earth. as shown in the picture below.

It instead of just collecting charge from lightning, It collects charge all along. It moves along the clouds and the clouds kind of charges the conducting part, the opposite charge appears on the inner part of the shell. This is collected by the capacitor. So instead of a single capacitor, I can attach many. And the opposite end of the capacitor is just attached to an antenna or some insulator. And the lower half is not hemispherical and is rugged.
This second idea is kind of incomplete. It needs further finishing. But the idea is basically represented here.

All along I was telling you how to store the charge from clouds. But the actual question is about How to use that energy?
Well, all the energy that we are speaking about here is in the form of charge. So If we could successfully store it, we can use it in many ways.

Now we have capacitors with energy equal to (Q²)/2C, where Q is the charge and C is the capacitance. So larger the charge value, bigger the amount of energy we stored.

There might many great ideas out there while I was just scribbling here, But I don’t know why there aren’t any working models. Maybe because the lightning takes place too little times.
This article is all about how to harness the energy of lightning, although I stepped out of topic a few times.

Comments and corrections are strongly encouraged.