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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Energy that comes in short, high intensity bursts at irregular intervals is about the worst possible form of power. You want go get energy from something that provides low or moderate levels of energy constantly and predictably.
Lightning is powerful. That’s bad, because huge amounts of energy heat up whatever you use to collect them and are likely to damage it. This is also true for the equipment and lines that direct the power from the collection point to the grid or to storage.
Lightning is brief. That’s bad because you want to keep a consistent amount of electricity going onto the grid. Lightning would send huge, brief spikes of electricity, so it needs to be stored somehow and released more slowly. That adds difficulty and expense and uses more resources.
Lightning is irregular. You want to be able to plan for the amount of power you will be getting and when you will be getting it. You can’t count on thunderstorms at any given time. That means you’d basically have to build baseline power generation that’s good enough to meet your needs, because you couldn’t count on having lightning around to help out. And then, what’s the point of collecting lightning?
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