Seems to my ignorant eyes that we could always somehow split the power received into more manageable units, even if it has to be splitted a million times, 🤷♂️.
Cant predict it, cant store it, cant get it where it needs to be
If we could eliminate transmission costs (superconductivity) and make energy storage trivial then it would become viable. We’d just install lightning rods around the world and plug them into the grid. We’d get a lot of power, after all.
But those are two huge “ifs.”
So we are just a few miracles away from a less effective solution than solar, forgive me if i don’t think its worth the brain power.
Lightning has a peak power of 1TW for 30 microseconds according to Wikipedia, corresponding to an energy content of about 8000 Watt-hours. That is enough to run a 100 watt conventional light bulb for 80 hours, so not actually much energy. You would need to capture about half a million lightning strikes a second if you wanted to power the world that way, for example.
I double-checked and you’re entirely right, i didn’t know that, i’ve heard many years ago that a single big lightning strike could power a large city for months(, while it’s indeed more a matter of minutes, if not less), and thought that it was a technological problem(, and that, e.g., flying devices anchored on the ground to either a portable infrastructure or a nationwide-extended network, could potentially make up for the unreliability and follow the storms, or even perhaps cause them one day).
Now i understand even better why solar power is preferred, thanks !A single lightning strike could power a large city for a few milliseconds. Not even seconds or minutes. Definitely not months.
Who’s using conventional 100w bulbs?
Get a 20w LED and it’s just 400 hours. Better, but still not much.
So if I’m wearing an Arduino to power some LED’s for cosplay, how often do I have to get struck by lightning to keep it going?
Only once, and they’ll remain lit for as long as it matters to you.
Hit a blunt to get lit for half a day.
Get hit by lightning to be lit for the rest of your life.
I’m a hobbyist in electronics repair. Conventional light bulbs make great AC current limiters and have a built-in indicator. 😂
1,400,000,000 strikes earth every year
According to https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/thunder-and-lightning/facts-about-lightning
That would be barely 45 strikes each second.
That’s four magnitudes away from your cited goal of powering earth.The reason noone talks about harnessing lightning as a power source is the diminishing returns on top of its unreliability and it being demanding on the tech it would need - which we know for decades now.
My conclusion is OP didn’t
researchgoogle his question first.I thought a bolt of lightning can produce 1.21 gigawatts? Doc Brown said this in Back to the Future movie.
I think the difficult part with harnessing lighting is the consistency of it. We would need to build in places where thunderstorms are common, which will only be true for particular seasons. The other limitation is the battery technology that we currently have. It could be a better resource if we could find a way to store electricity in a non-degrading system. I think the new solid state batteries are supposed to be that way, but I don’t know enough about them or this topic to really say. Alternatively, we can just pump people full of radiation until one of them becomes a weather controlling mutant so we can have infinite thunder storms.
Voltage rises with altitude, it’s theoretically possible to raise one end of a well insulated wire very high into the sky and jam the other end into the Earth to draw current from the sky.
This isn’t exactly harnessing lighting, more like harvesting the energy in lightning before it strikes.
…shouldn’t you be in 1985?
“One point twenty one jigawatts!”
i’ve brought it up with different engineers, everyone said it’s basically impossible, it is just too strong
Wondered the same, learned its too unreliable where it hits and not consistant enough. Thats also a big issue with renewable energy now, we dont have a proper way to store overloads and have to acually waste it currently.
There’s a retired astronaut whose entire post-NASA career has been devoted to developing a plasma propulsion engine. Which is kind of (though not exactly) what you’re thinking of.
Lighning to a power generator is what atomic bomb is to a nuclear reactor. If you had no means of predicting when and where the bomb will go off.
There are so many better options.
Remember how hard it was to capture a lightning bolt in Back to the Future movie? The only reason they succeeded was because they knew when and where lightning will strike in a week and they timed it out perfectly.
Unless you can control the weather which if it was possible, would likely take lots of energy ans is the only way to make a “lightning power plant” to my understanding.
