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 AEHI, 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.
[6] Another major challenge when attempting to harvest energy from lightning is the impossibility of predicting when and where thunderstorms will occur.
[8] Teramobile,[9] an international project initiated jointly by a French-German collaboration of CNRS (France) and DFG (Germany), has managed to trigger electric activity in thunderclouds by ultrashort lasers.