Ha! Finally!!! Let’s make something out of all this rain that pours on Vancouver dammit!!

PISSY PISSY VANCOUVER. PICTURED HERE IS THE GRANVILLE STREET BRIDGE HEADED DOWNTOWN. (PHOTO: TOM HARPEL)

I saw this headline and I nearly gleefully cackled so loud I fell off my chair:

”Scientists Produce Energy From Rain”

FINALLY. Seriously this is great, GREAT news. I hate the rain, which comes down in droves out here in Vancouver. All winter it’s wet. It’s damp. It’s cold. It’s never ending (seriously it rained FOR ALL BUT TWO DAYS last January. This actually broke a 1937 record for the most soused January. And the scary part was most of didn’t notice; it felt THAT normal to us long suffering and anemic citizens).

Anyways, it’s ABOUT TIME the rain made us rich in something other than damp and depression. See, we average about one meter of rainfall each year. That’s a lot of downpour to suffer and there had to be a silver lining somewhere in those never ending winter clouds…

Presto. Rain turned into power. The new technology, developed by scientists at the atomic energy commission (CEA) in Grenoble, France, takes the mechanical force produced by raindrops falling and converts it into electricity.

Here’s my favorite quote, as per the Red Orbit news article:

“We thought of raindrops because they are one of the still-unexploited energy sources in nature,” said Jean-Jacques Chaillout, who led the research, in an interview with the magazine New Scientist.

Yes, that’s right people. You read that right. “One of the still-unexploited energy sources in nature.” Cause we’ve raped and pillaged every other natural phenomena for energy.

Anyways, it might be too early to get all happy about the discovery - as far as us Vancouverites go. See, Chaillout’s system uses piezoelectric structures to convert the mechanical force of your raindrop into voltage. Now I don’t know how sensitive his little piezoelectric structures are but often what we call “rain” out here is really “to sit in a sopping wet cloud.” In this case we get less raindrops and than we do variations of drizzle, mist, spray, and when the weather is super gross, spit.