Billion-Degree Cloud Around Earth

texchanchan writes "From a report on Yahoo: 'The Earth's outer atmosphere works as a heat shield to deflect and absorb some of the damaging energy [of solar wind], but in the process creates a billion-degree cloud of electrified gas that sets up loops of multimillion amp electric current.' That's pretty wild to be going on over our heads. Researched at NASA's IMAGE project. Here's the press release, with links to movies of the electrical excitement."

Whole earth solar cell

[Perdo]

Great, a new source of energy. How do we tap it? An electricly conductive line hanging from space? A heat pump that works on the temperature differential between the hot zone and orbital shaded vacume?

Sounds like a threat to any potential space elevator too. Or perhaps a space elevator could be used to tap the energy.