Man, I wasted a ton of time in this last night trying to figure out electricity, and wondering why my "ingenious" system wasn't working.
As I was taking my first wobbly steps into the game, I wound up making a box of solid wall filled with noble gas. I marveled at the increase in pressure inside the box, and then I saw the little tidbit that noble gas turns to plasma when given a charge. I then spent probably half an hour trying to get electricity to flow from my battery to my conductive wall through an insulated wire. Yeah, that didn't work. Eventually I switched from insulated wire to bare metal, and all was well. I had ignition, and even better - the gas wasn't consumed in the process! I also noticed that the temperature in the box had jumped to a few thousand degrees. That gave me an idea! Have the plasma-generating charge come in on the material that only passes charge if it's cold. That way the plasma will only get triggered once, rather than continuously. I figured that later on I'd find a way to cool the box down to wind up with a repeating process.
The problem was that everything stopped working after the initial sparking! I couldn't figure it out. Plus, some of the noble gas was becoming attached to the conductive material! I didn't know what was going on. Then I accidentally hovered over one of the particles and noticed it was not noble gas, but lava. The temperature had risen to the point that it melted the cold-conducting particles!
Oops.
So much for that idea!