Yes. The trick is getting it to release ions to be carried away by the wind without expending too much power doing it.
Thus far people seem to have been making cathodes like in vacuum tubes, using heat or high voltage to drive electrons out of emitters like you see in ion-generator room-air cleaners.
That might be a dead end, from a complexity, cost, and power waste standpoint. On the other hand, maybe maintaining a second grid at high voltage relative to an emitter array could be simple enough, with just one charge pump for the whole system that need not burn much power.
But a purely passive, air-friction driven system ought to be more foolproof.
Probably either would work, so it just comes down to cost and extraction efficiency. A single active grid that can capture a high fraction of the available power (up to theoretical maximum around 30%) might end up better that a whole bunch of stacked, cheap, passive grids.
The materials science needed to make the somewhat-conductive, hydrophobic, passive-grid streamers that readily give up electrons to colliding air molecules seems within reach, but that is not a thing I know enough about.
Thus far people seem to have been making cathodes like in vacuum tubes, using heat or high voltage to drive electrons out of emitters like you see in ion-generator room-air cleaners.
That might be a dead end, from a complexity, cost, and power waste standpoint. On the other hand, maybe maintaining a second grid at high voltage relative to an emitter array could be simple enough, with just one charge pump for the whole system that need not burn much power.
But a purely passive, air-friction driven system ought to be more foolproof.
Probably either would work, so it just comes down to cost and extraction efficiency. A single active grid that can capture a high fraction of the available power (up to theoretical maximum around 30%) might end up better that a whole bunch of stacked, cheap, passive grids.
The materials science needed to make the somewhat-conductive, hydrophobic, passive-grid streamers that readily give up electrons to colliding air molecules seems within reach, but that is not a thing I know enough about.