>
>To put a practical feel on it, you would get about 1.3 milli-Newton on two 1 m^2 plates separated by 1 micron (10-6 metre) (see 1st paper below)

So about a million square meters of exquisitely surfaced and polished plates in a complete clean room, with a mechanism for separating them against this energy for substantially less than the force that brings them together, and a very efficient mechanism to extract energy from the motion over such a short distance, is all we'd need to power a lightbulb? 

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