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
Why don’t you fill your tea kettle from the fire hydrant? Why don’t you charge your cell phone in 7 seconds by plugging it in to the same outlet as your electric car? The answer for all is kind of similar: handling a lot of power for a short period of time is often much harder than handling less power for much longer. Besides all the other practical barriers people have mentioned like predictability and timing and so on.
At the end of the day, spending millions of dollars on a device that can capture a lightning bolt a few times a year is a lot less practical than building a wind turbine that can capture that same energy continuously.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Follow up question. Even if we could store this power, how much power would it be?
Follow up question. Even if we could store this power, how much power would it be?
Several problems:
* Electric power can’t be stored on that level. It’s more power than we can store, and we need to store it in a very, very short time span.
* It’s unpredictable. Power sources needs to be reliable.
* Even with lightning rods, actually capturing a lightning strike is fickle at best. You’d need a shitload of lightning rods.
* The amount of power involved is immense, which requires every single lightning rod, and the equipment attached to it, to be dimensioned like a blue whale.
* It wouldn’t deliver a clean, interference free power. Expect electronics on the power grid to pop like popcorn all the time.
Several problems:
* Electric power can’t be stored on that level. It’s more power than we can store, and we need to store it in a very, very short time span.
* It’s unpredictable. Power sources needs to be reliable.
* Even with lightning rods, actually capturing a lightning strike is fickle at best. You’d need a shitload of lightning rods.
* The amount of power involved is immense, which requires every single lightning rod, and the equipment attached to it, to be dimensioned like a blue whale.
* It wouldn’t deliver a clean, interference free power. Expect electronics on the power grid to pop like popcorn all the time.
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