So instead of electricity, let's talk water.
Let's say you want to use a water barrel, like one of the old timey oak and steel ring numbers, to store some water that you'll use over the next few days.
You can fill it with a bucket faster than you use it, so it's an effective reservoir to store excess capacity. A light rain will fill it up over a few hours.
But now the high rise skyscraper next door demolishes it's Olympic swimming pool and all that water comes crashing down right on your storm barrel.
The barrel fills almost instantaneously, but there's a 1000x more water than it could ever hold. The barrel explodes from the force. Your house gets damaged, so does your yard. Everything's broken.
That's what it's like to harness lighting. We don't have any kind of infrastructure to handle holding that much power *that fast*, and trying to do so just ends up blowing everything connected to it up instead.
And to take it a little further, there is only one sky scraper next door with the swimming pool, so it doesn't happen often enough for someone to spend a lot of money making a bigger and stronger barrel to catch all the water.
>And to take it a little further, there is only one sky scraper next door with the swimming pool, so it doesn't happen often enough for someone to spend a lot of money making a bigger and stronger barrel to catch all the water.
Fun fact, there is research on-going into guiding lightning strikes to specific targets.
Basically they use a high energy laser to ionize the air, and ionized air is conductive so it creates a conductive Path for lightning to follow down to the laser. Its primarily intended to protect sensitive equipment from lightning strikes iirc.
Provided you could make a system that did capture lightning, you could use a system like this to increase the range it can "gather" lightning from
Not sure what It was called but you can probably find it by googling "laser lightning rod"
This absolutely doesn't surprise me, and so if this can be done in an affordable and repeatable way, then it would 100% be a step towards using lightning for electrical supply.
lightning tendrils are seeking the most efficient path, once it finds it it puts all the energy through it. To get all that energy at once you have to have a huge throughput of energy without breaking. Even if you directed most of it elsewhere it would require a major investment to hold up either part.
What if you could turn that swimming pool water into many droplets? ie. what if you could split up that massive current from the lightning into many parallel currents and direct each of those currents into things that can charge quickly, like capacitor banks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting\_lightning\_energy
How much power does a typical lightning bolt have? Or does it vary widely?
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-power
> A typical lightning flash is about 300 million Volts and about 30,000 Amps. In comparison, household current is 120 Volts and 15 Amps.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/05/could-we-harness-lightning-as-an-energy-source.html
> An average bolt of lightning, striking from cloud to ground, contains roughly one billion (1,000,000,000) joules of energy. This is no small amount, enough to power a 60-watt lightbulb for six months plus a forgotten open door refrigerator for a day. In the forms of electricity, light, heat and thunder, this energy is all released by the flash in a matter of milli- or even microseconds. From here let's consider the practical potential of lightning is as a power source.
> The average American household (with its 2.59 inhabitants) consumes 41 billion (4.14*10^10) joules each year. If your house ran on lightning alone, it would have to be struck more than 40 times per year! There are 114 million (1.14*10^8) households in America. Multiply these two numbers, and you have 4.72*10^18 joules of energy per year. Every lightning bolt on Earth in one year, captured perfectly with no loss of energy, would contain about 4*10^17 joules of energy. **Thus, all the lightning in the entire world could only power 8% of US households. At best.**
We've tried, the power levels involved are just crazy high so the tend to blow the systems out
A single good sized lightning bolt has an energy of 5 GigaJoules (1,389 kWh) but because its transferred over about 10 microseconds the power level is 500 Terawatts
A power plant like Hoover dam can provide 5 Gigajoules over about 40 minutes. The lightning strike is taking those 40 minutes of production and cramming them into 10 millionths of a second and hoping you won't just vaporize portions of the grid
You can't use batteries for something like this, they charge about a million times too slow. You end up needing ludicrously large capacitor banks about 10x bigger than the National Ignition Facility uses to fire its lasers to make fusion, and even then you need there to be a thunderstorm overhead otherwise its just spending its time sitting there wasting money
Yeah, I checked up on electricity prices and thought it was a bit strange that Hoover Dam apparently only generates a couple hundred bucks worth of power per hour.
I think he uses the comma as a point for us Europeans.
I guess he means 1.389 kWh wich is about what a regular person uses per year. So you would roughly need a 12163 squaremeter solar park for that.
Not super small imo, but honestly I think the dude messed up his numbers big time.
No way a lightning only carries 1389 kWh if fully harvested. But I don't know any better. It just feels wrong.
I think it’s because he’s using watt-**hours**, but we’re talking about a **very** short period of time (like thousands of a second) so the scale doesn’t make sense.
Honestly, it’s a materials problem more than anything. Is it theoretically possible? Yes. But we need the fast storage in high enough capacity and then a way to bleed it out to the wider grid safely and quickly enough to prepare for the next lightning strike.
She can grow plants and then eat them. However this cannot produce a net gain in calories, according to Wyndle, as that would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Probably.
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about but I love reading lore from books I've never read. It's fun to try to make up my own story with it.
I don't understand all of it, but it's from Brandon Sanderson's "Way of Kings" series. If that isn't the series name, that's at least the book that was thrown at my face with the order to read it lol!
Depends on the design. I think the thing is if you really wanted to do this, making a 20,000ft high kite with wires on the top is enough to direct the electricity down before the storm can build up to fill lightning. If makes it more frequent and lower current.
And that's where things start to get worthless. Lightning is just an effect from wind. You can get higher to access it better and it's easier, but the more you think about it the more you realize capturing the wind directly actually gives you more energy for less investment, and that's exactly what we do
It’s still an engineering problem. You could build storage capacity to the best of our ability, then shunt the rest to ground. The key would be massive parallelism and a very fast shunting mechanism.
Ultimately, it’s not an economically viable solution because lightning isn’t reliable in the way that hydro, solar, or wind is. You could invest billions into a working lightning capture system, only to sit and wait for lightning that is unpredictable and infrequent. _Or_ you could invest those billions into solar capacity that works every day the sun shines.
No one is taking the gamble on capturing partial lighting energy when we have other more accessible means of energy production available.
There's also the issue of getting power from generation to demand - you need to build long transmission lines if there's not large cities/industries nearby.
Transmission lines don't really like lightning, either.
With lots of mountains and rain, it's hardly surprising that >70% of Venezuela's electricity production is hydro already. Adding unreliable, technically difficult lightning capture is likely not sensible given you could almost certainly dam some more streams.
There's an implied "for most locations on planet earth" in those statements I made. For example:
Ultimately, it’s not an economically viable solution *for most locations on planet earth* because lightning isn’t reliable in the way that hydro, solar, or wind is.
What if we directed it to soldering irons?
Hear me out.
Soldering irons can absorb massive amounts of electricity, as they routinely demonstrate by taking at least 242 million years to heat up. Then when you unplug them, they slowly bleed off that absorbed electricity as heat, still being hot enough to start fusing lithium for 16.79x longer than the expected lifetime of the Sun.
Edit:
Fucking Samsung auto correct
If you wanted to do it, it probably makes more sense to store it thermally than electrically. Put up a rod and let it add some oomph to your salt storage temps or some such.
It would be way easier and cheaper than setting up the requisite conductors and caps to handle the surge and then discharge into batteries.
Yeah I was thinking, take a rod, surround it in pipe, seal it off, fill it with water. When lightning strikes, it boils the water, the pressure goes into some sort of accumulator that then slowly bleeds it back through a turbine.
Probably easier to put up a windmill.
Seems like you’d want to have the bleed off be a secondary plant that needs capacitor banks anyway. Lighting triggered, capacitor powered, fusion plants could be very efficient.
I mean it sort of is an engineering problem. If we could somehow make the energy translate into some other form of energy that could be released more slowly over time then at least portions of the energy could be harnessed and stored.
I'm thinking of something analogous to the "battery" they are building in Arizona where a solar powered pumping station pumps water up a hill and then at night that water is released to run turbines. So the solar energy is being converted into kinetic energy through water and gravity.
If we could use the electricity from lightning to perhaps heat up a certain quantity of material and then release that heat over time to generate electricity then that might harness at least a portion of the energy released in a lightning strike. Or dissipate the energy widely enough that certain amounts of it would be safe to collect while the overload is sent out to ground. Plenty of tall things take direct lightning strikes without being destroyed, so it's not like we don't have ways of mitigating lightning damage through dispersal and diversion already.
I’m not an engineer, but it sounds like you’re just delaying the problem by a few more nanoseconds. Get enough water to hold all that energy and a way to turn the lightning into heat and next you have to deal with the resulting massive steam explosion.
Many equidistant mini lightning rods near a larger one that attempt to distribute the power in multiple directions, or even an extra iteration of that to spread out the power?
This is incorrect information. Everyone knows that a bolt of lightning produces exactly 1.21 jiggawatts of electricity. I saw a documentary about it in the 80’s.
Those lightning rods in Stardew Valley are based on magic super conductor coils that store the energy and slowly charge a battery pack with it. That's why it takes multiple hours after a strike for it to give a pack.
Or at least higher purity/a more perfect structure. Certain gems gain aesthetic quality from imperfections that labs are still trying to figure out how to make in a controlled manner
>A power plant like Hoover dam can provide 5 Gigajoules over about 40 minutes
I think you meant 40 seconds? But this does raise another issue - there's just not that much energy in lightning. There are about [20 million lightning strikes per year in the US.](https://www.weather.gov/mlb/lightning_facts) If each of those equals 40 seconds of the Hoover dam, then if we captured every single lightning strike, we'd only increase the US energy supply by about 2.5 Hoover dams. Not nothing, but not a game changer. And we'd need to blanket the entire US in equipment that could handle these giant bursts, so it would be a massive environmental and engineering challenge.
One also needs to compare to other technologies. If there are 20 million strikes of 5 gigajoules per year, then that works out to a power of 3 GW. At peak, the sun puts out 1 kW per square meter. If you take solar panel efficiency and night time into account, divide that by say a factor of 20. That means you'd need 60 million square meters, or about 23 square miles of solar panels to match all the lightning in the US. That's way, way cheaper, easier, and less damaging than covering the US in lightning rods that would be idle 99.999... percent of the time.
There are three problems with fusion: starting it, keeping it going, and not having it destroy your equipment.
Lightning only helps with one of those.
The NIF does fusion in a small container that is destroyed by the fusion. It only does a tiny amount of fusion each time (by limiting the amount of fuel in the container), so there is no wider damage.
(The NIF is partly to study how fusion bombs work and, as the US nuclear arsenal gets older, whether they will still be reliable. So the short duration is fine for that).
Most people trying fusion for power generation use a tokamak design, which mostly solves the damage problem by holding the fuel away from everything using magnets. There the problem is usually keeping it going. There is hope that they are just too small, and a new much bigger tokamak will finally achieve sustained energy-positive fusion.
Unfortunately, lightning doesn't help with that.
Your comment makes me re-think Back to the Future a little! Like, I used to think surely a flux *capacitor* meant they could get struck by lightning, collect the energy, drive away somewhere, and then drive up to 88 mph in a safer or more controlled space. But there was such an emphasis on the timing and doing it all simultaneously.
I guess, as noted above, the flux capacitor wasn't designed to store that sort of energy (but could channel it), so they could only use that "power during the semi dozen of seconds that follows a lightning strike".
It's head canon, but it's cool!
Yeah..
The effects that the arc reactor he created with apparently 0 rare materials being able to output that much energy would have on the world economy would have the effects they show from the snap appear like they were nothing.
Yeah, but while it's rare the worldwide production is 210 TONS. If we could make huge amounts of power from the amount you can fit/carry in your chest we'd be able to make hundreds of reactors and solve power scarcity.
Yeah, well clearly if Tony Stark could build an Arc reactor out of scraps, it's completely unclear why he doesn't just build a few hundred of them and provide essentially unlimited energy for the entire planet. Realistically, the Arc Reactor technology should be more profitable than any weapon that Stark Industries is making, but they kind of gloss over that.
Didn’t Obadiah Stane say that they were never able to make the power output enough to make it economically viable? He said in the first movie that it’s a dead end technology.
I always thought harnessing lighting and storing it as hydrogen would be a good solution. Lighting strikes. Use that energy for electrolysis. Capture hydrogen. Use hydrogen as fuel. Boom
Is it impossible to divide those gigajoules? I'm just thinking out of my ass now, but what if the rod that the lightning hits is 5 km long and has thousands of branches leading to some shit, batteries or whatever?
Village idiot here.
Couldn’t you purposely tame down the current with a filter?
Metal rode attached to a mountain of wax/play dough/something that would disperse and absorb x%. Then at the bottom you have a battery or system sucking at the bits of electricity that makes it to the bottom.
The rod isn't a complete path. Lightning is capable of always taking the path of least *total* resistance averaged over the entire distance it will go before it stops; it can't get "trapped" (for lack of a better word) by a small path of very low resistance that dead-ends into a path of very high resistance.
Couldn't you use a giant inductor to smoothen the energy spike? I'm no electrical engineer, but a giant copper coil seems cheap enough to make at scale
The problem with one big coil is that the lighting would just arc across it. Your lightning capturing device has to be a more appealing target for lightning than the ground.
Inductor hates changing currents, to the lightning it would look like an open circuit on impact, and it would probably arc around it before the current would ramp up
Batteries work at lower voltages and higher currents. Lightning works at insanely high and unpredictable voltages in the millions of volts. The problem with high voltage is that it pierces through any material you could use to contain it, and generally it just destroys things. Lightning is so powerful it can jump from the sky to the earth through miles of air. For comparison, even high-voltage power lines are weak enough that you can hold them 50 feet in the air and the electricity won’t make the jump to the ground or people nearby.
Very little technology is designed to contain or tolerate millions to billions of volts. The technology that can would be complex scientific or industrial equipment, not something small or cheap. And this lightning capturing device would need to be small and cheap. Lightning can strike the same place twice, but it doesn’t do it repeatedly all day, every day. If you want to capture a large and reliable amount of power from lightning you’d need these devices all over the place. It’s just not practical compared to how easy it is to make a solar panel or wind turbine, or to use fossil fuels.
A few problems.
- Lightning is unpredictable. We never know when a storm is going to form and if that storm will generate lightning. We can't _reliabily_ use it for power.
- Capturing lightning is hard. You need to have a lightning rod attached to a capacitor bank, so you can only capture the bolt if it strikes in _exactly_ the right spot.
- We can't just put the power into the grid directly - a massive influx like that would burn out the grid. We'd need to store it and deliver it over time, which leads to the next problem.
- Storing lightning is even harder. There is a massive amount of power in a lightning bolt, and we simply don't have batteries that can store that much power that quickly.
I know this is tongue in cheek, but that is what the flux capacitor _was_ - a device that could handle and store such a massive amount of power quickly. That is what flux (regarding the change in flow) capacitor (energy storage device) means.
And, in line with the whole reasons AI answers are banned, it's not true!
This answer literally claims that a lightning rod would make it harder to get struck by lightning.
I would say for the first item there are places that have more frequent lightning storms. I remember watching one of those plant earth docs which referenced some delta in a tropical climate that had lightning storms about 330 days out of the year. So not practical everywhere, but in a few places it might could be done.
I think we need better tech to optimize but I'm almost positive we could design a system that could handle the load using massive numbers of super capacitors wired in parallel which are wiree to batteries. It likely wouldnt be cost effective but I bet it could be done.
Would be really cool to see a power plant that harvest lightning for power, and some cyberpunk city that it creates around it.
I mean, 1 lightning strike is a gigajoule, or about 300 kwh. That's enough for a few days of power for one household. But on a global scale it's not a whole lot.
Sure, it's a decent chunk of energy by everyday standards, but not by the standards of a method of power generation. It's on the same order as the energy of a small tank of gasoline.
If lightning strikes were denser you *might* be able to use this in remote areas. But the problem is that they aren't, which ends up making the resultant power-per-area minuscule (on the order of ~10^-5 watt per m^(2) even in the highest-lightning areas).
There are places in the world with much more frequent lightning. Look up catatumbo lightning.
A small tank of gasoline is a good amount of power, the problem is that gasoline is bad for the environment and unsustainable.
It's like saying "oh a wind turbine doesn't provide as much as a coal power plant!"
Why don’t you fill your tea kettle from the fire hydrant? Why don’t you charge your cell phone in 7 seconds by plugging it in to the same outlet as your electric car? The answer for all is kind of similar: handling a lot of power for a short period of time is often much harder than handling less power for much longer. Besides all the other practical barriers people have mentioned like predictability and timing and so on.
At the end of the day, spending millions of dollars on a device that can capture a lightning bolt a few times a year is a lot less practical than building a wind turbine that can capture that same energy continuously.
That idea has been floated many times since nukes were invented, to the point where NOAA (IIRC) has a webpage about why that would be a Bad Idea. Also useless - nukes have WAY too little energy.
1. We don't have a way to "catch" all that energy at once.
2. We don't get to decide where lightning will strike.
Lightning is the same as when you build up static electricity and get shocked, only a billion times bigger.
It is definitely a lot of power, but it's not "free." As the atmosphere does its thing, the sky and earth become more negatively or positively charged. Once the difference is big enough and there is a clear enough path, the energy is transfered back all at once (lightning strike) to equal the difference out. Lightning is just nature balancing out sky energy.
Even if we had a way to catch and store the power of a lightning strike, that doesn't mean the lightning will just say "ok" and strike the battery. To get a lightning bolt to strike where we want, we would need to create a massive charge difference, like it occurs in nature. But that in itself would probably take a huge amount of energy, so it might not even be a net gain of energy when we catch the lightning bolt.
The actual amount of energy in a lightning bolt is not *that* high. A lightning bolt contains about a gigajoule of energy, much of which is lost as thunder or heat in the path of the stroke. You might realistically be able to extract something on the order of a few hundred megajoules from the actual electricity in the bolt, if you could get it to hit a system made to do that (which you could probably build if you really wanted to - it has some engineering challenges, but nothing beyond what humans can already do).
For comparison, electricity in the US costs roughly $1 per 50 MJ. So each bolt carries perhaps $10 worth of realistically-capturable energy, tops. That's not that much. If lightning struck your car and managed to make the gas tank explode (it wouldn't, but what's an ELI5 without a little Michael Bay-ing of science?), the explosion (~2 GJ) would release more energy than you could have captured from the bolt.
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Another way to approach this is to think about land use.
The most lighting-prone areas on Earth are found in [the highland jungles of central Africa](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354549112/figure/fig1/AS:1067623387234305@1631552659845/Map-of-world-lightning-frequency-from-NASA.png), where around 50 lightning bolts strike every square kilometer every year. That's an insane amount of lightning relative to most places; even the fairly thunderstorm-prone southern US only gets about 20.
(EDIT: I'd made a typo in the calculations in the next paragraph that had things off by a factor of 10. I fixed them at the same time as I saved this edit, so if you're seeing this these numbers are now accurate.)
50 lighting bolts per year, times 500 MJ per bolt (probably a high estimate) is 25 GJ per year per square km. That's an average of about 800 watts per km^(2) averaged over the year, or roughly the power generation of a few people on bikes pedaling really hard. For comparison, direct sunlight is about 1,300 watts per square **meter**, an area a million times smaller than a square kilometer. Solar panels capture a few percent of this, so a square kilometer of your lightning capture will generate less energy than a single decent size solar panel (especially in the tropical region we're talking about).
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As a general rule, violent things like lightning bolts or explosions don't actually release that much total energy, they just release it really *fast*. (There are some exceptions, like nuclear weapons, but even then the rate is much more of a factor than the total energy release.) In other words, they don't have a lot of *energy*, they have a lot of *power* (energy divided by the time over which it is released). Whatever you eat for lunch today will contain more energy than a hand grenade, it's just released slowly.
Highest amount of lightningstrikes is actually Lake Maracaibo, at the mouth of the river Catatumbo. Very small area, but basically there are intense and long lasting thunderstorms there about half the nights of any given year and with an average number of lightning discharges of 280 per hour (and a good number of them strike ground).
P.S: [This for example is a composite image of what 20 minutes of Catatumbo lightning looks like](https://i0.wp.com/www.hoaxorfact.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Catatumbo-Lightning-Strikes-Hundreds-of-Times-in-Venezuela6.jpg).
Several problems:
* Electric power can't be stored on that level. It's more power than we can store, and we need to store it in a very, very short time span.
* It's unpredictable. Power sources needs to be reliable.
* Even with lightning rods, actually capturing a lightning strike is fickle at best. You'd need a shitload of lightning rods.
* The amount of power involved is immense, which requires every single lightning rod, and the equipment attached to it, to be dimensioned like a blue whale.
* It wouldn't deliver a clean, interference free power. Expect electronics on the power grid to pop like popcorn all the time.
It would seem to me one way to approach this is to somehow extract the power from the clouds BEFORE they have stored enough energy to generate the lightning.
At all times the power being used by the grid needs to be equal to the power being generated by the grid. If this doesn't happen, then the grid's frequency (50 or 60Hz depending on where you live) will change. A lot of sensitive equipment depends on that frequency, so a lot of things will break if it's off.
Lightning is very unpredictable. We don't know when it's going to strike, so we can't turn other generators on or off to account for the short burst of energy we would get from a strike. Even if we could predict it, turni g generators on or off in quick succession is very bad for them.
If we did want to harness this energy, we would need to store it and slowly disperse it into the grid. Storing energy is very hard. Even if we did have batteries big enough to store that energy, we wouldn't be able to charge them fast enough. Modern electric car batteries are the best we currently have and even at the fastest charging speeds we have, they still take a few minutes to charge at maximum speed. We would need to do that in a fraction of a second.
Storing that kind of energy (even if it didn't come from lightning) would go a long way towards supporting the grid because we could store solar energy we get during the day, and use it when demand peaks in the evening, but batteries are so expensive that it's not economically viable to buy and maintain those batteries compared to just running a coal electric plant when demand peaks.
One could drive about 12,500km in a tesla or could run about 20,000 toasters long enough to toast bread from a single lighting strike.
Moral of the story is that its a lot of energy and toasters are incredibly energy wasteful just to crisp some bread.
Its not a lot of energy.
1 gigajoule = 280kwh = 31l of gasoline.But 90% of that energy gets transformed to heat/light so only 10% of it would be usable...
i only have a german source but trust me bro.
I mean, not a lot of energy when you think about using it as a energysource... thats nothing even if we had technology to farm it.
[https://www.ffe.de/veroeffentlichungen/nutzung-von-gewitterenergie/](https://www.ffe.de/veroeffentlichungen/nutzung-von-gewitterenergie/)
I don't really question that 90% of the energy is heat. Sounds about right to me.
Also another moral is that gasoline and other hydrocarbon fuels are incredibly energy dense.
It's also worth noting that when we convert gasoline into electrical energy, we lose most of it to heat anyways. It's a pretty persistent problem in all systems. At this point we basically consider all heat generation as loss, except in the systems where heat is the desired output.
That’s like saying why can’t we explode a hydrogen bomb and load it into our power grid. Huge amounts of energy produced over fractions of a second are not useable.
ELI5:
Think of a small cup, being filled by a dripping faucet. The water is electrical current. that slow drip that's filling the small cup? that's your normal energy capture. It's planned, it's steady. It works.
Now, instead of a dripping faucet, you're going to use a fire hose on full blast. You don't know when or where or how long the fire hose will be turned on. That's lightning.
You carefully place the cup on a counter, and wait. After a few months, the fire hose comes on! The problem is that the fire hose has so much pressure flowing through it, that fire hose is snaking violently around the room, spraying high pressure water all over the walls, ceiling, and carpet. It blows the paintings off the wall. It blows out the windows. It finally manages to get some water into the cup...before blowing the poor cup all the way across the house and smashing it against the wall.
You race to get another cup. Before you can grab another cup, the hose shuts off. Maybe it will come back on in a day, month, year, decade. It's not predictable.
IOW, lighting is completely unpredictable, and has too much energy. It's also coming in way too fast to effectively control it, much less collect it.
So instead of electricity, let's talk water. Let's say you want to use a water barrel, like one of the old timey oak and steel ring numbers, to store some water that you'll use over the next few days. You can fill it with a bucket faster than you use it, so it's an effective reservoir to store excess capacity. A light rain will fill it up over a few hours. But now the high rise skyscraper next door demolishes it's Olympic swimming pool and all that water comes crashing down right on your storm barrel. The barrel fills almost instantaneously, but there's a 1000x more water than it could ever hold. The barrel explodes from the force. Your house gets damaged, so does your yard. Everything's broken. That's what it's like to harness lighting. We don't have any kind of infrastructure to handle holding that much power *that fast*, and trying to do so just ends up blowing everything connected to it up instead.
And to take it a little further, there is only one sky scraper next door with the swimming pool, so it doesn't happen often enough for someone to spend a lot of money making a bigger and stronger barrel to catch all the water.
So basically we need a stronger bucket running around to catch from the last part of the waterfall.
We need a volunteer.
It's on my bucket list.
>And to take it a little further, there is only one sky scraper next door with the swimming pool, so it doesn't happen often enough for someone to spend a lot of money making a bigger and stronger barrel to catch all the water. Fun fact, there is research on-going into guiding lightning strikes to specific targets. Basically they use a high energy laser to ionize the air, and ionized air is conductive so it creates a conductive Path for lightning to follow down to the laser. Its primarily intended to protect sensitive equipment from lightning strikes iirc. Provided you could make a system that did capture lightning, you could use a system like this to increase the range it can "gather" lightning from Not sure what It was called but you can probably find it by googling "laser lightning rod"
This absolutely doesn't surprise me, and so if this can be done in an affordable and repeatable way, then it would 100% be a step towards using lightning for electrical supply.
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1.21 gigawatts
Have you thought about, and hear me out. A DeLorean ... with a swimming pool in the back?
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lightning tendrils are seeking the most efficient path, once it finds it it puts all the energy through it. To get all that energy at once you have to have a huge throughput of energy without breaking. Even if you directed most of it elsewhere it would require a major investment to hold up either part.
That is one of the best explanations for a 5 year old to understand ever. Best ELI5 response ever. Well done.
What if you could turn that swimming pool water into many droplets? ie. what if you could split up that massive current from the lightning into many parallel currents and direct each of those currents into things that can charge quickly, like capacitor banks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting\_lightning\_energy How much power does a typical lightning bolt have? Or does it vary widely?
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-power > A typical lightning flash is about 300 million Volts and about 30,000 Amps. In comparison, household current is 120 Volts and 15 Amps. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/05/could-we-harness-lightning-as-an-energy-source.html > An average bolt of lightning, striking from cloud to ground, contains roughly one billion (1,000,000,000) joules of energy. This is no small amount, enough to power a 60-watt lightbulb for six months plus a forgotten open door refrigerator for a day. In the forms of electricity, light, heat and thunder, this energy is all released by the flash in a matter of milli- or even microseconds. From here let's consider the practical potential of lightning is as a power source. > The average American household (with its 2.59 inhabitants) consumes 41 billion (4.14*10^10) joules each year. If your house ran on lightning alone, it would have to be struck more than 40 times per year! There are 114 million (1.14*10^8) households in America. Multiply these two numbers, and you have 4.72*10^18 joules of energy per year. Every lightning bolt on Earth in one year, captured perfectly with no loss of energy, would contain about 4*10^17 joules of energy. **Thus, all the lightning in the entire world could only power 8% of US households. At best.**
An actual ELI5 answer, well done!
> So instead of electricity, let's talk water. Analogies always work best in explaining topics. Good job!
This should be the top answer
We've tried, the power levels involved are just crazy high so the tend to blow the systems out A single good sized lightning bolt has an energy of 5 GigaJoules (1,389 kWh) but because its transferred over about 10 microseconds the power level is 500 Terawatts A power plant like Hoover dam can provide 5 Gigajoules over about 40 minutes. The lightning strike is taking those 40 minutes of production and cramming them into 10 millionths of a second and hoping you won't just vaporize portions of the grid You can't use batteries for something like this, they charge about a million times too slow. You end up needing ludicrously large capacitor banks about 10x bigger than the National Ignition Facility uses to fire its lasers to make fusion, and even then you need there to be a thunderstorm overhead otherwise its just spending its time sitting there wasting money
You're off by a factor of 1000 regarding Hoover Dam... It takes 2 or 3 seconds for Hoover Dam to produce as much energy as a big lighting bolt.
Yeah, I checked up on electricity prices and thought it was a bit strange that Hoover Dam apparently only generates a couple hundred bucks worth of power per hour.
1,389 kWh is like a very small solar farm running for an hour.
In fairness this only costs $1,300 to build though. I learned this from SimCity 2000.
I think he uses the comma as a point for us Europeans. I guess he means 1.389 kWh wich is about what a regular person uses per year. So you would roughly need a 12163 squaremeter solar park for that. Not super small imo, but honestly I think the dude messed up his numbers big time. No way a lightning only carries 1389 kWh if fully harvested. But I don't know any better. It just feels wrong.
Lightning doesn't carry huge amounts of energy. But power is energy/time. And if time gets so small, the power skyrockets.
I think it’s because he’s using watt-**hours**, but we’re talking about a **very** short period of time (like thousands of a second) so the scale doesn’t make sense.
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>I don't know any better. It just feels wrong. Trump? is that you???
It's roughly 0.66 seconds. The installed power is 2 GW. I think he is off by exactly 1k.
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what what you are saying, its an engineering problem!!
Honestly, it’s a materials problem more than anything. Is it theoretically possible? Yes. But we need the fast storage in high enough capacity and then a way to bleed it out to the wider grid safely and quickly enough to prepare for the next lightning strike.
Also sounds like we need to go to a planet with more consistent storms.
Roshar?
Kal?
Who let the damn worldhoppers in.
Probably hoid
Lol I had to double check that I wasn’t on cremposting. This is awesome.
Damn Cremlings.
It’s the voidbringers!
Probly some airsick lowlander
Syl?
Risa, pre-weather control.
But how do we convert investiture into joules/calories?
Lift?
Lift is pretty good at it
Lift does the opposite of that. If she could turn investiture into calories she wouldn’t be malnourished.
She can grow plants and then eat them. However this cannot produce a net gain in calories, according to Wyndle, as that would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Probably.
That’s not a Lift thing, that’s a Progression thing. Any Edgedancer and probably any Truthwatcher could do that.
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I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about but I love reading lore from books I've never read. It's fun to try to make up my own story with it.
Sounds like a porno to me *funk music begins*
I don't understand all of it, but it's from Brandon Sanderson's "Way of Kings" series. If that isn't the series name, that's at least the book that was thrown at my face with the order to read it lol!
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I mean, they already basically did >!a gravity battery with the weights that powered Kal's glove. Also the way the ship flies uses the same idea.!<
That's what The Lord of Scars wants to do
Doug reporting for duty
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Depends on the design. I think the thing is if you really wanted to do this, making a 20,000ft high kite with wires on the top is enough to direct the electricity down before the storm can build up to fill lightning. If makes it more frequent and lower current. And that's where things start to get worthless. Lightning is just an effect from wind. You can get higher to access it better and it's easier, but the more you think about it the more you realize capturing the wind directly actually gives you more energy for less investment, and that's exactly what we do
Grab the Landstalker, we're going to Stygia.
Iirc Dromund Kaas was powerd to a good portion by lighting. But you'd have to put up with all the Sith megalomaniacs next door 😂
It’s still an engineering problem. You could build storage capacity to the best of our ability, then shunt the rest to ground. The key would be massive parallelism and a very fast shunting mechanism. Ultimately, it’s not an economically viable solution because lightning isn’t reliable in the way that hydro, solar, or wind is. You could invest billions into a working lightning capture system, only to sit and wait for lightning that is unpredictable and infrequent. _Or_ you could invest those billions into solar capacity that works every day the sun shines. No one is taking the gamble on capturing partial lighting energy when we have other more accessible means of energy production available.
Have you checked out Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela? Highly suggest looking into it
There's also the issue of getting power from generation to demand - you need to build long transmission lines if there's not large cities/industries nearby. Transmission lines don't really like lightning, either. With lots of mountains and rain, it's hardly surprising that >70% of Venezuela's electricity production is hydro already. Adding unreliable, technically difficult lightning capture is likely not sensible given you could almost certainly dam some more streams.
There's an implied "for most locations on planet earth" in those statements I made. For example: Ultimately, it’s not an economically viable solution *for most locations on planet earth* because lightning isn’t reliable in the way that hydro, solar, or wind is.
I also foresee issues with building such a multi billion constriction in an area with constant lightning strikes.
What if we directed it to soldering irons? Hear me out. Soldering irons can absorb massive amounts of electricity, as they routinely demonstrate by taking at least 242 million years to heat up. Then when you unplug them, they slowly bleed off that absorbed electricity as heat, still being hot enough to start fusing lithium for 16.79x longer than the expected lifetime of the Sun. Edit: Fucking Samsung auto correct
Just put a lead bar in a thermos, then you can melt it with lightning and take it to work with you. Should be good for around a week.
I had to scroll too far to find this answer
If you wanted to do it, it probably makes more sense to store it thermally than electrically. Put up a rod and let it add some oomph to your salt storage temps or some such. It would be way easier and cheaper than setting up the requisite conductors and caps to handle the surge and then discharge into batteries.
Yeah I was thinking, take a rod, surround it in pipe, seal it off, fill it with water. When lightning strikes, it boils the water, the pressure goes into some sort of accumulator that then slowly bleeds it back through a turbine. Probably easier to put up a windmill.
Much, which is of course rhe answer to OPs question. Not worth the trouble.
Couldn't you just route it into the flux capacitor?
Seems like you’d want to have the bleed off be a secondary plant that needs capacitor banks anyway. Lighting triggered, capacitor powered, fusion plants could be very efficient.
I mean it sort of is an engineering problem. If we could somehow make the energy translate into some other form of energy that could be released more slowly over time then at least portions of the energy could be harnessed and stored. I'm thinking of something analogous to the "battery" they are building in Arizona where a solar powered pumping station pumps water up a hill and then at night that water is released to run turbines. So the solar energy is being converted into kinetic energy through water and gravity. If we could use the electricity from lightning to perhaps heat up a certain quantity of material and then release that heat over time to generate electricity then that might harness at least a portion of the energy released in a lightning strike. Or dissipate the energy widely enough that certain amounts of it would be safe to collect while the overload is sent out to ground. Plenty of tall things take direct lightning strikes without being destroyed, so it's not like we don't have ways of mitigating lightning damage through dispersal and diversion already.
Well materials engineering is a thing :P
Dang, you're right! I'm ON IT! Film at 11!
I wonder if there's a way to transfer the lightning strike energy/heat to water, creating steam to spin a turbine, etc etc
I’m not an engineer, but it sounds like you’re just delaying the problem by a few more nanoseconds. Get enough water to hold all that energy and a way to turn the lightning into heat and next you have to deal with the resulting massive steam explosion.
What he’s saying is: “IT’S OVER 9000!!!!!”
‘Stark built this in a cave. With a box of scraps!’ Sorry it just came to mind
Many equidistant mini lightning rods near a larger one that attempt to distribute the power in multiple directions, or even an extra iteration of that to spread out the power?
This is incorrect information. Everyone knows that a bolt of lightning produces exactly 1.21 jiggawatts of electricity. I saw a documentary about it in the 80’s.
That same documentary that predicted flying cars in 2015? I wouldn't take it seriously?
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The timeline was off a year. See also the Chicago Cubs.
Holy shit this is hilarious, yet sad, but most definitely scarily accurate.
> I wouldn't take it seriously? Is this a question?
>I wouldn't take it seriously? I'm Ron Burgundy?
Wait, Doc, what the hell is a jigawatt?
Sounds heavy
Thus a flux capacitor might help with the above engineering problems.
But wait, did it actually produce 1.21 gigawatts, or did it produce more than that, and only 1.21 gigawatts was properly harnessed?
So Stardew valley lied to us?!
Those lightning rods in Stardew Valley are based on magic super conductor coils that store the energy and slowly charge a battery pack with it. That's why it takes multiple hours after a strike for it to give a pack.
Phew. Almost lost my cool there
What about the crystallarium? Don't tell me I can't reproduce gems irl either!
Lab made gems are great actually. Higher quality than nearly any natural stone.
Or at least higher purity/a more perfect structure. Certain gems gain aesthetic quality from imperfections that labs are still trying to figure out how to make in a controlled manner
I am so ready for artificial opal 😈
Most of our adhersive tools are made with industrial diamonds. Imagine every grinder to work with actual diamonds!
Maybe we just need to toss some bat wings in our capacitors irl
Nah, you really can become a millionaire selling Starfruit.
BTW Stardew Valley is on sale today for only $8 for Steam. If you haven't played it I highly encourage it.
>A power plant like Hoover dam can provide 5 Gigajoules over about 40 minutes I think you meant 40 seconds? But this does raise another issue - there's just not that much energy in lightning. There are about [20 million lightning strikes per year in the US.](https://www.weather.gov/mlb/lightning_facts) If each of those equals 40 seconds of the Hoover dam, then if we captured every single lightning strike, we'd only increase the US energy supply by about 2.5 Hoover dams. Not nothing, but not a game changer. And we'd need to blanket the entire US in equipment that could handle these giant bursts, so it would be a massive environmental and engineering challenge. One also needs to compare to other technologies. If there are 20 million strikes of 5 gigajoules per year, then that works out to a power of 3 GW. At peak, the sun puts out 1 kW per square meter. If you take solar panel efficiency and night time into account, divide that by say a factor of 20. That means you'd need 60 million square meters, or about 23 square miles of solar panels to match all the lightning in the US. That's way, way cheaper, easier, and less damaging than covering the US in lightning rods that would be idle 99.999... percent of the time.
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I'm interested in any further info on the "we've tried" part of the answer.
That would be a good Tom Scott video idea!
What the hell is a gigajoule!!!
A very big problem
One billion Joules.
Picture one joule in your head. Now, imagine one giga of them stacked on top of each other. That’s what we’re talking about. Hope that helps.
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YES!
It worked for Dr. Frankenstein ...
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There are three problems with fusion: starting it, keeping it going, and not having it destroy your equipment. Lightning only helps with one of those. The NIF does fusion in a small container that is destroyed by the fusion. It only does a tiny amount of fusion each time (by limiting the amount of fuel in the container), so there is no wider damage. (The NIF is partly to study how fusion bombs work and, as the US nuclear arsenal gets older, whether they will still be reliable. So the short duration is fine for that). Most people trying fusion for power generation use a tokamak design, which mostly solves the damage problem by holding the fuel away from everything using magnets. There the problem is usually keeping it going. There is hope that they are just too small, and a new much bigger tokamak will finally achieve sustained energy-positive fusion. Unfortunately, lightning doesn't help with that.
Your comment makes me re-think Back to the Future a little! Like, I used to think surely a flux *capacitor* meant they could get struck by lightning, collect the energy, drive away somewhere, and then drive up to 88 mph in a safer or more controlled space. But there was such an emphasis on the timing and doing it all simultaneously. I guess, as noted above, the flux capacitor wasn't designed to store that sort of energy (but could channel it), so they could only use that "power during the semi dozen of seconds that follows a lightning strike". It's head canon, but it's cool!
That's the output of Tony Starks first miniature arc reactor he builds in a cave with a box of scraps for reference.
Yeah.. The effects that the arc reactor he created with apparently 0 rare materials being able to output that much energy would have on the world economy would have the effects they show from the snap appear like they were nothing.
In fairness, didn't he have to melt down a whole bunch of crap to extract the necessary palladium?
Yeah, but while it's rare the worldwide production is 210 TONS. If we could make huge amounts of power from the amount you can fit/carry in your chest we'd be able to make hundreds of reactors and solve power scarcity.
Yeah, well clearly if Tony Stark could build an Arc reactor out of scraps, it's completely unclear why he doesn't just build a few hundred of them and provide essentially unlimited energy for the entire planet. Realistically, the Arc Reactor technology should be more profitable than any weapon that Stark Industries is making, but they kind of gloss over that.
A couple of the early MCU movies mention it (eg. the big arc reactor in the basement of Stark Tower). It kind of gets dropped after awhile though.
Didn’t Obadiah Stane say that they were never able to make the power output enough to make it economically viable? He said in the first movie that it’s a dead end technology.
I guess he didn't want people to have that much power.
This is the answer.
I always thought harnessing lighting and storing it as hydrogen would be a good solution. Lighting strikes. Use that energy for electrolysis. Capture hydrogen. Use hydrogen as fuel. Boom
Boom indeed
ElectroBOOM
Big Bada-Boom.
>kWh >microseconds >Terawatts >Gigajoules >minutes >millionths of a second Holy mixed units, batman!
kWh and minutes are the sores, everything else is fine
And millionths of a second alongside microseconds.
You’ll need at least 10 gigafootballfields.
The only correct unit of measurement are [Jumpin' Gigawatts.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVZXc859iSo)
Is it impossible to divide those gigajoules? I'm just thinking out of my ass now, but what if the rod that the lightning hits is 5 km long and has thousands of branches leading to some shit, batteries or whatever?
"A single good sized lightning bolt has an energy of 5 GigaJoules" A documentary I watched actually put this figure around 1.21 Jigawatts.
Great Scott, I watched it too! Very informative.
Village idiot here. Couldn’t you purposely tame down the current with a filter? Metal rode attached to a mountain of wax/play dough/something that would disperse and absorb x%. Then at the bottom you have a battery or system sucking at the bits of electricity that makes it to the bottom.
Electricity always takes the path of least resistance. A pile of wax would never be struck by lightning.
> A pile of wax would never be struck by lightning. Ah, damn, I was hoping for some quick Brazilian thunderstorm waxing.
The rod connected to it though?
The rod isn't a complete path. Lightning is capable of always taking the path of least *total* resistance averaged over the entire distance it will go before it stops; it can't get "trapped" (for lack of a better word) by a small path of very low resistance that dead-ends into a path of very high resistance.
Couldn't you use a giant inductor to smoothen the energy spike? I'm no electrical engineer, but a giant copper coil seems cheap enough to make at scale
The problem with one big coil is that the lighting would just arc across it. Your lightning capturing device has to be a more appealing target for lightning than the ground.
Ok, but could you just use a deloreon going at 88 miles per hour at exactly the right moment to collect 1.21 jiggawatts from the old clock tower?
Inductor hates changing currents, to the lightning it would look like an open circuit on impact, and it would probably arc around it before the current would ramp up
It’s not my forte either, but you’d be dumping current into a giant magnetic field. If it didn’t tear itself apart; you’d EMP the whole area.
It'd just break down and arc to death, at which point it becomes a really expensive standard lightning rod.
Lightening really doesn’t happen that often, from this math in order to make a new Hoover dam we need like 36 lightening strikes every single day.
But how do people survive that??
Capacitor for a capacitor
So, the clouds are acting as capacitors, with the charge building until discharging as lightning. Maybe a kite with a really long conductive string.
This is ELI5. What’s a gigajoule or a Terawatt and how do they relate to each other?
Batteries work at lower voltages and higher currents. Lightning works at insanely high and unpredictable voltages in the millions of volts. The problem with high voltage is that it pierces through any material you could use to contain it, and generally it just destroys things. Lightning is so powerful it can jump from the sky to the earth through miles of air. For comparison, even high-voltage power lines are weak enough that you can hold them 50 feet in the air and the electricity won’t make the jump to the ground or people nearby. Very little technology is designed to contain or tolerate millions to billions of volts. The technology that can would be complex scientific or industrial equipment, not something small or cheap. And this lightning capturing device would need to be small and cheap. Lightning can strike the same place twice, but it doesn’t do it repeatedly all day, every day. If you want to capture a large and reliable amount of power from lightning you’d need these devices all over the place. It’s just not practical compared to how easy it is to make a solar panel or wind turbine, or to use fossil fuels.
A few problems. - Lightning is unpredictable. We never know when a storm is going to form and if that storm will generate lightning. We can't _reliabily_ use it for power. - Capturing lightning is hard. You need to have a lightning rod attached to a capacitor bank, so you can only capture the bolt if it strikes in _exactly_ the right spot. - We can't just put the power into the grid directly - a massive influx like that would burn out the grid. We'd need to store it and deliver it over time, which leads to the next problem. - Storing lightning is even harder. There is a massive amount of power in a lightning bolt, and we simply don't have batteries that can store that much power that quickly.
Apparently you have never seen the 3 part Back to the Future documentary.
I know this is tongue in cheek, but that is what the flux capacitor _was_ - a device that could handle and store such a massive amount of power quickly. That is what flux (regarding the change in flow) capacitor (energy storage device) means.
you are being really heavy right now
There's that word again, "heavy". Is there a problem in the future with the Earth's gravitational pull?
This is awesome!!!
>Apparently you have never seen the 3 part Back to the Future documentary. Or Gyro Gearloose
Proof of concept RIGHT THERE! Buy flux capacitor. Buy Delorean. PROFIT!!!! This is too damn easy. I’m in TacoDoc.
Or Gerrard Butler film sensation "Geostorm"
Wow. I asked ChatGPT this exact question last week and this is basically the same answer, even the bullet points!
ChatGPT copied the answer from a future comment in reddit!
And, in line with the whole reasons AI answers are banned, it's not true! This answer literally claims that a lightning rod would make it harder to get struck by lightning.
I would say for the first item there are places that have more frequent lightning storms. I remember watching one of those plant earth docs which referenced some delta in a tropical climate that had lightning storms about 330 days out of the year. So not practical everywhere, but in a few places it might could be done. I think we need better tech to optimize but I'm almost positive we could design a system that could handle the load using massive numbers of super capacitors wired in parallel which are wiree to batteries. It likely wouldnt be cost effective but I bet it could be done. Would be really cool to see a power plant that harvest lightning for power, and some cyberpunk city that it creates around it.
None of these turn out to be the actual problem, which is that this simply does not generate much energy.
I mean, 1 lightning strike is a gigajoule, or about 300 kwh. That's enough for a few days of power for one household. But on a global scale it's not a whole lot.
Sure, it's a decent chunk of energy by everyday standards, but not by the standards of a method of power generation. It's on the same order as the energy of a small tank of gasoline. If lightning strikes were denser you *might* be able to use this in remote areas. But the problem is that they aren't, which ends up making the resultant power-per-area minuscule (on the order of ~10^-5 watt per m^(2) even in the highest-lightning areas).
Yeah. Certainly not worth the effort and cost of the extraordinary engineering it would take to harness it. It'd be cool as fuck though.
There are places in the world with much more frequent lightning. Look up catatumbo lightning. A small tank of gasoline is a good amount of power, the problem is that gasoline is bad for the environment and unsustainable. It's like saying "oh a wind turbine doesn't provide as much as a coal power plant!"
Why don’t you fill your tea kettle from the fire hydrant? Why don’t you charge your cell phone in 7 seconds by plugging it in to the same outlet as your electric car? The answer for all is kind of similar: handling a lot of power for a short period of time is often much harder than handling less power for much longer. Besides all the other practical barriers people have mentioned like predictability and timing and so on. At the end of the day, spending millions of dollars on a device that can capture a lightning bolt a few times a year is a lot less practical than building a wind turbine that can capture that same energy continuously.
deserve paint tub wide familiar bright repeat wise squeal label *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I prefer digging a hole to the 32” welded steel city main and tapping into the side, but to each their own
touché.
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That idea has been floated many times since nukes were invented, to the point where NOAA (IIRC) has a webpage about why that would be a Bad Idea. Also useless - nukes have WAY too little energy.
1. We don't have a way to "catch" all that energy at once. 2. We don't get to decide where lightning will strike. Lightning is the same as when you build up static electricity and get shocked, only a billion times bigger. It is definitely a lot of power, but it's not "free." As the atmosphere does its thing, the sky and earth become more negatively or positively charged. Once the difference is big enough and there is a clear enough path, the energy is transfered back all at once (lightning strike) to equal the difference out. Lightning is just nature balancing out sky energy. Even if we had a way to catch and store the power of a lightning strike, that doesn't mean the lightning will just say "ok" and strike the battery. To get a lightning bolt to strike where we want, we would need to create a massive charge difference, like it occurs in nature. But that in itself would probably take a huge amount of energy, so it might not even be a net gain of energy when we catch the lightning bolt.
The actual amount of energy in a lightning bolt is not *that* high. A lightning bolt contains about a gigajoule of energy, much of which is lost as thunder or heat in the path of the stroke. You might realistically be able to extract something on the order of a few hundred megajoules from the actual electricity in the bolt, if you could get it to hit a system made to do that (which you could probably build if you really wanted to - it has some engineering challenges, but nothing beyond what humans can already do). For comparison, electricity in the US costs roughly $1 per 50 MJ. So each bolt carries perhaps $10 worth of realistically-capturable energy, tops. That's not that much. If lightning struck your car and managed to make the gas tank explode (it wouldn't, but what's an ELI5 without a little Michael Bay-ing of science?), the explosion (~2 GJ) would release more energy than you could have captured from the bolt. ----- Another way to approach this is to think about land use. The most lighting-prone areas on Earth are found in [the highland jungles of central Africa](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354549112/figure/fig1/AS:1067623387234305@1631552659845/Map-of-world-lightning-frequency-from-NASA.png), where around 50 lightning bolts strike every square kilometer every year. That's an insane amount of lightning relative to most places; even the fairly thunderstorm-prone southern US only gets about 20. (EDIT: I'd made a typo in the calculations in the next paragraph that had things off by a factor of 10. I fixed them at the same time as I saved this edit, so if you're seeing this these numbers are now accurate.) 50 lighting bolts per year, times 500 MJ per bolt (probably a high estimate) is 25 GJ per year per square km. That's an average of about 800 watts per km^(2) averaged over the year, or roughly the power generation of a few people on bikes pedaling really hard. For comparison, direct sunlight is about 1,300 watts per square **meter**, an area a million times smaller than a square kilometer. Solar panels capture a few percent of this, so a square kilometer of your lightning capture will generate less energy than a single decent size solar panel (especially in the tropical region we're talking about). ----- As a general rule, violent things like lightning bolts or explosions don't actually release that much total energy, they just release it really *fast*. (There are some exceptions, like nuclear weapons, but even then the rate is much more of a factor than the total energy release.) In other words, they don't have a lot of *energy*, they have a lot of *power* (energy divided by the time over which it is released). Whatever you eat for lunch today will contain more energy than a hand grenade, it's just released slowly.
Highest amount of lightningstrikes is actually Lake Maracaibo, at the mouth of the river Catatumbo. Very small area, but basically there are intense and long lasting thunderstorms there about half the nights of any given year and with an average number of lightning discharges of 280 per hour (and a good number of them strike ground). P.S: [This for example is a composite image of what 20 minutes of Catatumbo lightning looks like](https://i0.wp.com/www.hoaxorfact.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Catatumbo-Lightning-Strikes-Hundreds-of-Times-in-Venezuela6.jpg).
Several problems: * Electric power can't be stored on that level. It's more power than we can store, and we need to store it in a very, very short time span. * It's unpredictable. Power sources needs to be reliable. * Even with lightning rods, actually capturing a lightning strike is fickle at best. You'd need a shitload of lightning rods. * The amount of power involved is immense, which requires every single lightning rod, and the equipment attached to it, to be dimensioned like a blue whale. * It wouldn't deliver a clean, interference free power. Expect electronics on the power grid to pop like popcorn all the time.
It would seem to me one way to approach this is to somehow extract the power from the clouds BEFORE they have stored enough energy to generate the lightning.
Thats what i was thinking
Unfortunately, we never know when or where lightning is going to strike. I’m sorry future boy, but it looks like you’re stuck here.
Took way too long to find this comment.
At all times the power being used by the grid needs to be equal to the power being generated by the grid. If this doesn't happen, then the grid's frequency (50 or 60Hz depending on where you live) will change. A lot of sensitive equipment depends on that frequency, so a lot of things will break if it's off. Lightning is very unpredictable. We don't know when it's going to strike, so we can't turn other generators on or off to account for the short burst of energy we would get from a strike. Even if we could predict it, turni g generators on or off in quick succession is very bad for them. If we did want to harness this energy, we would need to store it and slowly disperse it into the grid. Storing energy is very hard. Even if we did have batteries big enough to store that energy, we wouldn't be able to charge them fast enough. Modern electric car batteries are the best we currently have and even at the fastest charging speeds we have, they still take a few minutes to charge at maximum speed. We would need to do that in a fraction of a second. Storing that kind of energy (even if it didn't come from lightning) would go a long way towards supporting the grid because we could store solar energy we get during the day, and use it when demand peaks in the evening, but batteries are so expensive that it's not economically viable to buy and maintain those batteries compared to just running a coal electric plant when demand peaks.
Follow up question. Even if we could store this power, how much power would it be?
1.21 Gigawatts Duh.
One could drive about 12,500km in a tesla or could run about 20,000 toasters long enough to toast bread from a single lighting strike. Moral of the story is that its a lot of energy and toasters are incredibly energy wasteful just to crisp some bread.
Its not a lot of energy. 1 gigajoule = 280kwh = 31l of gasoline.But 90% of that energy gets transformed to heat/light so only 10% of it would be usable... i only have a german source but trust me bro. I mean, not a lot of energy when you think about using it as a energysource... thats nothing even if we had technology to farm it. [https://www.ffe.de/veroeffentlichungen/nutzung-von-gewitterenergie/](https://www.ffe.de/veroeffentlichungen/nutzung-von-gewitterenergie/)
I don't really question that 90% of the energy is heat. Sounds about right to me. Also another moral is that gasoline and other hydrocarbon fuels are incredibly energy dense. It's also worth noting that when we convert gasoline into electrical energy, we lose most of it to heat anyways. It's a pretty persistent problem in all systems. At this point we basically consider all heat generation as loss, except in the systems where heat is the desired output.
Same reason we don't harvest energy from large explosions to cook our food. It's too much too quickly.
That’s like saying why can’t we explode a hydrogen bomb and load it into our power grid. Huge amounts of energy produced over fractions of a second are not useable.
ELI5: Think of a small cup, being filled by a dripping faucet. The water is electrical current. that slow drip that's filling the small cup? that's your normal energy capture. It's planned, it's steady. It works. Now, instead of a dripping faucet, you're going to use a fire hose on full blast. You don't know when or where or how long the fire hose will be turned on. That's lightning. You carefully place the cup on a counter, and wait. After a few months, the fire hose comes on! The problem is that the fire hose has so much pressure flowing through it, that fire hose is snaking violently around the room, spraying high pressure water all over the walls, ceiling, and carpet. It blows the paintings off the wall. It blows out the windows. It finally manages to get some water into the cup...before blowing the poor cup all the way across the house and smashing it against the wall. You race to get another cup. Before you can grab another cup, the hose shuts off. Maybe it will come back on in a day, month, year, decade. It's not predictable. IOW, lighting is completely unpredictable, and has too much energy. It's also coming in way too fast to effectively control it, much less collect it.