I guess it’s about time I just accepted defeat. It was such a good idea at first, too! So sometimes we have lightning storms, and I looked up at the lightning and I thought…that’s a LOT of power. Imagine if you could hold up your phone to a lightning storm and just get it zapped. Bang, full power. Basically, any gadget would be equipped with a mini lightning rod, and there would be a permanent storm above Melbourne, and no one would ever run out of power.
I had branding and everything. It was going to be called Charge-Z, with the Z meaning something that was yet to be determined. I like to think that people would theorise about that, and it’d be like…raising brand awareness, with no effort. AND I had corporate partnerships planned. There is all this talk about commercial energy storage to help Melbourne businesses at the moment, so I was thinking we could make it so lightning keep striking it at regular intervals. So until we get the lightning rods sorted in everyone’s gadgets- which is, to be fair, quite a feat of miniaturisation- then we’ll still have unlimited power anyway. Energy storage would be available to everyone, obviously, just not as personalised as I would’ve liked.
My main opposition was the power needed to generate permanent storm-clouds over the city, which was ironically the most draining thing. Basically, I needed multiple lightning strikes to get it going, but I’d have to wait for a storm, and ones with loads of lightning just weren’t common enough to fill up the batteries.
Just imagine it, though. All our energy needs met by power just raining from the sky, which I guess is the entire point of commercial solar systems. They essentially beat us to it, and THEY don’t even need to wait for a storm. It’s sunny, like…50% of the time anyway. We were never going to compete with that.