Episode 41 | Lightning Larceny | Steve LeRoy
My dad came up with the idea for this episode when he sent me a text message one day saying, "My thought has for a long time been how could we ever get to harness and store the tremendous energy in lightning.” Well Dad, this one’s for you, and boy it’s a doozy!
A lightning bolt contains about 10,000,000,000 watts (10 GW) of electricity, but it only lasts about 5/1,000 of a second. Extrapolated over kilowatt-hours, that's not as much energy as you'd think.
If it were possible to capture a lightning bolt and store it, you would need 1) A way to direct the bolt to your equipment and 2) A way to store it.
University of Professor Martin Uman has been experimenting with capturing lightning for years. However, he's not wild about the idea of using lightning practically.
That led me to Steve LeRoy, an inventor from Illinois with over 40 patent applications. One of those, according to a 2007 article in New York Times Magazine, was a method for capturing ALL of the energy from a lightning strike.
Steve says he tested his process in his garage, using a Tesla coil to simulate the lightning, and a capacitor to store the energy. It was successful, and he was able to power a light bulb for about 20 minutes. In fact, he says he was so successful, the FCC detected his work with their sensors and paid him a visit to his house!
Steve says he was paid a stock certificate for his technology by a company calling itself Alternate Energy Holdings, run by a businessman named Don Gillispie. According to Steve, Gillispie tried to replicate his patented process in Houston, but according to the NYT, Gillispie "couldn't make it work."
I did not have to find out from Steve what happened when I saw an article about Gillispie from 2015 where he was apparently on the run from U.S. Marshalls for wire fraud for a scheme to build a $10 billion nuclear power plant in Idaho. Steve says Gillispie used Steve's patents, including the one for lightning-to-energy, to "pump and dump," creating revenue in the nuclear plant scheme.
I've dealt with several shady individuals over the years, and I was happy when Steve agreed to this interview. You'll see that both of our experiences with creeps like these had similar characteristics.
I think the lessons from this episode are important for any young inventors with promising technologies, and this conversation also helped me put a few personal demons to bed.
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