Lightning appears to be this limitless supply of energy, so why isn’t this being considered as a valid source of our future energy needs. Surely we could have some sort of lightning rod connected to a huge array of batteries to store all of this electricity. I’m sure there is a simple explanation, but I’m interested to hear what it is.
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1. We don’t have a way to “catch” all that energy at once.
2. We don’t get to decide where lightning will strike.
Lightning is the same as when you build up static electricity and get shocked, only a billion times bigger.
It is definitely a lot of power, but it’s not “free.” As the atmosphere does its thing, the sky and earth become more negatively or positively charged. Once the difference is big enough and there is a clear enough path, the energy is transfered back all at once (lightning strike) to equal the difference out. Lightning is just nature balancing out sky energy.
Even if we had a way to catch and store the power of a lightning strike, that doesn’t mean the lightning will just say “ok” and strike the battery. To get a lightning bolt to strike where we want, we would need to create a massive charge difference, like it occurs in nature. But that in itself would probably take a huge amount of energy, so it might not even be a net gain of energy when we catch the lightning bolt.
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