Saw lot of videos and it seems pretty easy to push wire to thunder clouds to make lightning hit exactly that wire. Why not put some sort of big ass super capacitor and collect this free power for sake of humanity?
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So Google says a lightning bolt delivers about 300,000,000 (3•10⁸) volts and supplies about 30,000 (3•10⁴) amps of current. This gives you 9•10¹² watts. A lightning bolt apparently flashes about 4 times in the span of roughly 0.2seconds for 0.00003 s (3•10’⁵) each for a total time of 12•10`⁵ seconds of power delivery.
So the energy delivered in this lightning strike is 108•10⁷ watt•seconds. Power is typically sold and measured by the kilowatt•hr so let’s convert it to that for comparison
Convert watts to kilowatts by dividing by 1000 to have 108•10⁴ (the numbers are small enough to type now, so 1,080,000 kW•seconds. Convert seconds to hours by dividing by 3600 to get 300kW•hr of energy.
For reference this could run an 1100W microwave for just over 11 days. A TV uses a little over 100kW•hr per year, and each Bitcoin transaction uses about 700 kW•hr.
Using the average power cost in the US of 12¢ / kWh, the amount of power produced would be worth like $36
To compare to other means of power generation, a barrel of oil produces about 1700kW•hr, a ton of coal produces ~2500kW•hr of energy
For the small amount of energy created, and how seldom lightning would actually hit this generator, it wouldn’t be worth it. It’d be better to invest in a wind turbine that can produce enough power to run several hundred homes
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