Lightening powered???

[alexidewayz]

At the risk of sounding stupid on my very first post/tread, here I go anyways, bare in mind that I started yesterday in the world of electronics/electricity.

Why has no one (correct me if I'm wrong) found a way to capt and store the power of lightening yet??? Again correct me if I'm wrong, but I read somewhere, a long time ago, that the energy contained in one lightening bolt, would be enough to sustain a big city in electricity for a whole week )or day, don't really remember).

Thanks.


Alex.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

There are many problems involved, like how to capture it, and how to store it, not to mention that it's a very intermittent source.

 

[Hero999]

This question gets asked almost every couple of months.

There isn't actually that much energy in lightning anyway, it's just that it's condensed into a short period of time.

 

[ronsimpson]

I agree and disagree with Hero99 about how much energy there is in lightning. There must be a large amount of energy in a cloud. By the time lightning jumps 1000 feet, and lights up the night for miles around, there is not much left for you to steel. When I worked broadcast I have seen large pieces of metal bent form the current in lightning.

It takes an hour to charge a car battery. Lightning last a very short period of time. I do no remember the real numbers from the class on lightning protection, but I believe the real energy happens for a period of time much shorter than the average observer thinks. One of the problems is that the peak energy is so high you can’t handle it and the average is so low you can’t use it. A mega watt for 1/100 of a second once a week = almost nothing.

 

[alexidewayz]

Well, thank you all very much for your explanations.

 

[Salgat]

Once super capacitors become standard it may be possible.

 

[mneary]

It's important to understand the distinction between power and energy. Power is V*I. A lightning strike has trillions of watts, for several microseconds.

Energy is another thing. It's V*I*T. A common estimate of a typical lightning strike is a billion joules (sounds like a lot?). If you captured and stored it with 100% efficiency, you would need a direct strike every two weeks at every home powered this way.

 

[alexidewayz]

...you would need a direct strike every two weeks at every home powered this way.

I didn't meant to rely solely on that form of energy, but if we had the techno. to do so, it would still be that much more energy that could be used and didn't sent 1000 of tons of Co2 in the atmosphere in the process.

+ I'm sure that, as technology develops, they would find ways to attract & catch more strikes on each different storm...

But as I said, I'm a newbie and I'm far from grasping all the intricate concepts of electronics yet, so I'm not arguing here, just discussing & learning.

Thanks again to all who took a bit of their time to feed my hungry mind.

Alex.

 

[Marks256]

I think we need to find someone who can finish Tesla's work. He had many ideas about "free" energy. I use "free" loosely.

 

[mneary]

Again, a distinction is in order, between free energy and free transmission.

 

[Marks256]

Well sorry. to be fair, it would have been free energy if it wasn't for westinghouse...

 

[mneary]

To be fair to George Westinghouse, energy would be free except for the laws of thermodynamics.

 

[things]

If you get a big enough metl pole, i'm sure you could attract as many lightning strikes as you wanted, but as the others have said, there is no device that has the ability to capture 1000A at over 1million V + in less than a second

 

[Krumlink]

It may be a little off topic, but lightning ionizes the air and essentially explodes it, causing a massive burst of x rays. This has only been recently discovered.

 

[skeeterb]

Ben Franklin supposedly captured energy from lightning in a Leyden Jar.

 

[mneary]

Ben Franklin supposedly captured energy from lightning in a Leyden Jar.

That would have been about 0.01 Joule.

 

[Super_voip]

While Ben Franklin did do a lot of work with lightning I've seen articles that said he only proposed the kite experiment and never conducted it. Several people reading his work did attempt his proposed experiment and were killed or badly injured.

 

[Sceadwian]

No electrical device perhaps, harness it to a heating element of some kind and heat a tank of water. I imagine it would be exceptional difficult to design such a system though.
Mythbusters did Franklins experiment. Even on a 'normal' day they were getting a couple thousand volts, just from the wind blowing against the string. Current was probably not much though.

 

[adaminc]

You might be able to use lightning to melt a salt, and use that to create steam, like how some of those new solar thermal plants are using the sun to melt salt and generate power from steam turbines.

 

[uaefame]

To be frank with you, my country in a whole year there is no rain like 4 times a year sound dry. Yup its dry. I think this kind of alternative is good is we can build a prototype to store impulse of high current with high voltage.

From my battery theory, The faster you charge a batter the less capacity you can store.

From this it seems battery techology for lighting strike is useless.