By Don White

This morning I noted last night’s storm had dumped a couple inches of water into my pool, filling it up. We live in Orlando and that was a violent storm, with lightning striking nearby and thunder for just under an hour so loud we could have been in a war zone.

Lightning strikes more frequently between Tampa and Orlando, along Interstate 4, than any place in the country. I was wondering why the Feds and states don’t get some vision and learn how to harness that energy, the kind of vision that sent us to the moon – instead of spending five or ten million dollars on turtle research in Florida and much more on minnow preservation in California.

Why doesn’t energy czar Carol Browner stop tripping around to groups she is member of or has been close to, Socialists International, and to it’s US affiliate the crypto Marxist Democratic Socialists of America, and a world conservation society that believes big countries should shrink their economies and use far less energy?

Like millions of Americans, I happen to differ with her. We believe that using what God has left us, energy in any form we can find it, is not an evil but a way to enhance the well being and standard of living of the entire world. And this form of energy wouldn’t emit additional carbons into the atmosphere, if you’re worried about that.

Getting back to lightning, there was a lot of energy in that lightning last night. Why doesn't someone fund a feasibility study to see if harnessing lightning’s power is doable and within reach?

Ben Franklin suspected that lightning was an electrical current in nature, and he wanted to see if he was right. Here’s how he tested it – by using a metal key up near his kite he discovered that lightning passes through metal. He found that lightning is really a stream of electrified air or plasma. His famous stormy kite flight in June of 1752 led him to develop many of the terms that we still use today when we talk about electricity: battery, conductor, condenser, charge, discharge, uncharged, negative, minus, plus, electric shock, and electrician.

Franklin proved there is vast energy stored in dark clouds of the sky. It is up to us to take his lead and make it usable for mankind. A bolt of lightning can be as hot as the surface of the sun.

I propose a series of one-hundred-foot towers or lightning rods – maybe not even that high – between Orlando and Tampa. If scientists find a way to harness that power in the sky and to store it in dry cells for later use, then why couldn’t people erect their own towers near their homes both for safety and energy storage?

Power is becoming so expensive in Florida, it is becoming so prohibitive that we’ve set our thermostat up to 80 and are thinking of placing some solar panels on the roof for water heating, but they’re not cheap either. I think there are government subsidies for that. Why not for lightning power storage?

Just a thought. I would invite comments pro or con.