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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Costs outweigh the benefits not to mention the unpredictability of it. It would be better to make a Dyson sphere megaproject that can harness the sun.
It is not free power, and there is not much in there either. There is an enormous difference in potential, which is ionizing the air and allows lightning to happen.
The issue is also that all the energy is sent instantly, which means you need some kind of storage device than can convert that massive potential (ie. voltage) into something more usable and storage, and do that fast since lightning is over pretty fast. This device does not exist. A “big ass supercap” will likely explode, or be so big you’d waste way more energy placing it where you think there will be lightning than it will ever collect.
Lightning would be inconsistent, distributed across a wide area, and would be costly to capture and distribute for little energy generated. You could get more power out of your local creek over time with a turbine.
Our grid is centralized because we haven’t figured out how to capture, store, and share power in a distributed fashion. The grid isn’t made up that way…but it eventually could. Imagine a storm that would normally knock out power, being used to power wind turbines in every household, that feeds homes that would normally go dark. Solar power being used to generate and store electricity, and having that power feed areas overnight, and those with bad weather over a few days, a few states away.
TLDR: It isn’t that easy, and even if it was easy, it wouldn’t yield consistent results.
Its like saying why cant we collect power from a single nuclear explosion… Well we sort of do, via controlled fission, and controlled electric output. Lightning is the nuclear bomb equavalant to generating electricity, its high power but very short lasting, worse yet unpridictable.
There is a famous art piece called “lightning field” it’s a field with metal rods. Visitors have to get on waitlist to visit, so you hope your visit is during storm season. What ends up actually happening is a lot of nothing, but in the rare cases there is a storm with the right conditions, it’s pretty epic.
Point being, a fairly large scale attempt to capture lightning for the beauty of it, captures nothing most of the time.
Imagine you have one of those wooden on-the-ground pools, it’s empty and you want to fill it up very fast because it’s summer and hot. Let’s say you somehow manage to drop 10,000 liters of water from the sky as a giant blob. Will it fill up? If the pool was physically unbreakable, yes, but it is not, so the pool will be crushed, explode and the water will be lost.
Trying to gather energy from lightning is like that.
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