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.
