The possibility of harnessing the spectacular power of lightning has captured the imagination for a long time — or at least since Doc Brown returned Marty McFly to 1985 at the moment that lightning struck Hill Valley’s clock tower in “Back to the Future.” This summer, a company named Alternate Energy Holdings set out to see if the energy in lightning could actually be harvested, and if so, whether full-scale lightning farms might one day become a meaningful source of electricity.

Image Credit... Jens Mortensen for The New York Times

The company purchased a design plan from Steve LeRoy, an Illinois inventor who reportedly powered a 60-watt bulb for 20 minutes with a small, artificially generated lightning flash. Then they went about trying to develop a real-life system in the Houston area, where electrical storms are frequent. In the simplest terms, LeRoy’s concept involved a tower, an array of grounding wires to shunt off most of the incoming energy and a giant capacitor. Theoretically, if enough energy is delivered to the capacitor, it can be stored, converted to alternating current and transferred to the power grid.