Electrostatic charges on a bare wire stretched in the air? 1

[Sempronio1960]

A bare wire stretched in the air, in particular the conductor of a power line taut between their supports on its isolators, and never fed, without any type of electrical connections at the ends, can be the site of electrostatic charges? If so, why?

 

[mikekilroy]

In the late 1960's as a young ham radio operator, I built a colinear 2 meter antenna. It was approx. 24 foot long, mounted to bamboo pole. basically you can consider it a 24 ft piece of wire cut in the center so 12 ft down and 12 feet up from center point where it was fed by a piece of open 50 ohm RG8 coax. the two pieces of 12foot wires were taped to a long bamboo pole mounted vertical in a tv mount on the roof of my house in Cleve, OH.

anytime it snowed, the snow would brush against these 2 wires and the result was constant sparking at the PL259 connector inside the house by my ham radio. a ZAP sound and blue spark anywhere from 1/sec to 1/30sec apart.

This was definitely static build up by the snow blowing across the wire in open air. No power lines anywhere nearby. Less often it did this ZAP sparking w/o aid of snow, just higher winds blowing.

So my experience tells me, yes, you can get high enough voltage static build up on a wire not near any other power source to cause sparking, thus thousands of volts.