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.
In: 1090
At all times the power being used by the grid needs to be equal to the power being generated by the grid. If this doesn’t happen, then the grid’s frequency (50 or 60Hz depending on where you live) will change. A lot of sensitive equipment depends on that frequency, so a lot of things will break if it’s off.
Lightning is very unpredictable. We don’t know when it’s going to strike, so we can’t turn other generators on or off to account for the short burst of energy we would get from a strike. Even if we could predict it, turni g generators on or off in quick succession is very bad for them.
If we did want to harness this energy, we would need to store it and slowly disperse it into the grid. Storing energy is very hard. Even if we did have batteries big enough to store that energy, we wouldn’t be able to charge them fast enough. Modern electric car batteries are the best we currently have and even at the fastest charging speeds we have, they still take a few minutes to charge at maximum speed. We would need to do that in a fraction of a second.
Storing that kind of energy (even if it didn’t come from lightning) would go a long way towards supporting the grid because we could store solar energy we get during the day, and use it when demand peaks in the evening, but batteries are so expensive that it’s not economically viable to buy and maintain those batteries compared to just running a coal electric plant when demand peaks.
Latest Answers