Atmospheric Electricity as a Cosmogenic Phenomenon: A New Paradigm for the Global Electric Circuit and the Foundation of Future Energy

This work proposes a radical reassessment of the classical concept of atmospheric electricity (AE). Conventional science treats lightning and thunderstorms as primary generators of the electric field. We argue that this causal relationship must be reversed: atmospheric electricity is not a consequence of weather processes, but a primary cosmogenic factor that participates in governing weather and natural disasters. The central idea is that the Sun is the ultimate primary source of all forms of energy on Earth–thermal, kinetic, electrical, and chemical. In this model, Earth is an open cosmogenic energy system with at least two parallel circuits: The thermal and kinetic circuit: solar electromagnetic radiation heats the surface and atmosphere, generating winds, currents, and circulation. The electrical circuit: the solar wind, a corpuscular plasma flow, is separated by Earth’s magnetic field at the poles and continuously charges the planetary “Earth–ionosphere” capacitor. In the proposed model, called here the cosmogenic model of the GEC (the Kholoshenko model), lightning and thunderstorms are no longer primary generators. They release excess energy accumulated in the global capacitor when its potential reaches a critical value. The Global Electric Circuit (GEC) is treated as an open, flowing system connected to a practically inexhaustible source–the solar wind and solar radiation–making it a strategic foundation for the energy of the future. The work also argues that the key engineering challenge in using atmospheric electricity is not harvesting the static field (about 130 V/m), but capturing powerful impulse discharges–natural or triggered lightning. R&D is under way in parallel to develop a specialized storage device capable of receiving high–voltage lightning impulses of several hundred thousand volts and with a steep voltage rise (dU/dt), creating a potential route to solving this problem.