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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There’s far less power in a single lightning bolt than most people think. Only about one barrel of oil worth.
Then there’s the infrequency of storms. In particular, non-rain clouds are more likely to produce lightning, but then you have off and on seasons for storms. You would have to specifically pick the location with frequent storm activity, much like they select sites with high average wind for wind turbines.
Even capturing it would require specialised capacitors to receive the energy quickly enough, followed by a slower dump of the power into long term storage where it could be released gradually into the grid, but all those processes would loose some of the power to heat and such.
All up, it’s just not economical and anywhere with frequent enough storms to feed it would probably create more power with wind turbines to take the breeze.
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