The lightning machine works! Mwahahahaa! Would you like a drink?

Greg Leyh is the founder of Lightning On Demand, a team of artists and engineers that creates and studies electrical phenomena (and lightning is fascinating). Among other things, this team of mad scientists has built the 12-meter high, 130,000 watt discharging, tesla coil wand sculpture Electrum. Greg Leyh has a new project in the works, and while it’s not a plan to take over the world with lightning machines, it’s still impressive:

Less than an hour outside the glittering cesspool of Las Vegas, sits the future site of the Nevada Lightning Laboratory. The 80-acres are barren, but the plans for the land are impressive. The NLL project plans to erect a set of twin 12-story tall Tesla coils, capable of creating an arc over 300 feet long.

The twin coils will be used to test aircraft vulnerability to electrical storms, as well as provide some pretty dazzling entertainment to the public. Elevators will take on-lookers to the tops of the towers where there will be viewing platforms, safely encased in the Faraday cages atop the Twins.

There will even be a bar and lounge area. From your plush seat, dry martini in hand, you will be able to watch a simulated lightning storm with the same specs as the real thing. [io9]

The NLL crew hope to include in their electric show: full-scale lightning strikes, re-enactments of Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment, helicopters flying through discharges of electricity, humans throwing arcs of  lightning with their hands and Greg Leyh riding the lightning (ok, I made that last one up).