Electricity From the Lightining

Not feasible. Due to the incredible (short duration) currents involved there is simply no way to easily store an electrical lightning discharge safely, let alone economically. And before you ask, banks of pulse rated HV capacitors are not a feasible way.

Don't try this at home boys and girls!

No comment on feasibility &/or safety involved.

However, While everyone is agreed on the "very short duration" of the discharge, i'm rembering that there's usually a potential difference between 2 points in the atmosphere. You can often demonstrate this with a microVolt meter, holding 1 probe as high + the other as low as possible; that's over ~5ft.

If one could be satisfied with the low kV range, that might be available for quite long periods of time.

V. good practical joke.

Better than about mother-in-law's ones

Sidevalveguru,

I don't know about 5', where the "noise" would tend to obscure the voltage, but over larger differences in height the voltage gradient is well known, but the power available is truly negligible. The problem lies in the charge being so diffuse. It is analogous to a rarefied gas at extremely high temperature, yet containing negligible heat energy per unit volume.

Even in storm clouds the charges are relatively diffuse until shortly before a lightning event. It would require a totally impractical amount of surface area to extract a useful amount of energy.

Regards, Greg

There is a wiki on this.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Lightning_Power

The statement that a single lightning bolt can power over a 100 million light bulbs is misleading. Even if you did find a way to connect 100 million light bulbs, you'd only get less than a second of light and then it's back to darkness.

The idea is to store the lightning's energy, maybe by storing it in a capacitor. However, I've yet to hear of a capacitor that is built to withstand the energy of a single bolt, much less a series of bolts. If someone does build such a capacitor and somehow is able to hook it up to the grid, as soon as the storm's over, he's out of business.

I don't think it's feasible...in short.

I think you have understood the working concept of the capacitor its just a dielectric medium in between two electrodes . the lightining strike is about millions of volt and a huge flow of current such an high electric power will cause dielectric breakdown when applied to the capacitor

the easy way to understand this is from nature the clouds acts as a positive(anode) and earth as a negative (cathode) and the in b/w space as a huge di-electric medium just like a capacitor it because of the dielectric breakdown of air/space medium the counduction of current is happening due to rapid ionization.

so theoriticaly it may look like but not so possible and be carefull while exprimenting many peoples have died in the research to prove that the lightning is electrical in nature

What about recovering wasted current that is discharged into the atmosphere from HV overhead lines. Although illegal and highly dangerous to do youself, should the electrical companies not be responsible for recapturing this leakage? There are many cases of people, winning compensation for illness caused by living in close proximity to susch lines. There are also case of the grid companies taking legal action on people who have done such power recover.

There is no conclusive evidence that high-voltage lines cause illness. Recovering waste energy from high-voltage lines is not cost-effective to implement.

Prob'ly the greatest source of illness near X-mission lines are the "agent orange" like materials in the vicinity?

My guess is that if the originator had powerlines in his neighborhood, he wouldn't be seeking an alternative.

I remember hearing a news story about a person who buried a loop of wire under a high tension line. He had rigged it to power his home. The utility company detected the power drain and traced it to him. He was charged with theft.

I don't know if the story was true, could be one of those urban legend stories. Like the one about the guy using a rope tied to his car's bumper as a safety line while clearing snow off his roof, and the wife forgot... Alternately he was nailing down shake shingles...

We had a similar story down here. Big loop in a barn roof. Confirmed true I believe. It can be done but the losses are very high, and of course easy to trace.

I heard a story of a man that erected a camp with one of the sides parallel and underneath the power line. the top wire was insulated, the length was apparently calculated to deliver the correct voltage.

I don't know if the story is true and if it did work or not.

Very feasible! Just stand outside in a lightning storm holding a long metal pole upwards and just Wait.

Before we totally dismiss the idea that we can harness electricity from lightning, we need to be humble enough to recount the thousands of comments made by experts over the years about what we definitely can and cannot do, but then went ahead and 'just did it'. During my ripening years (now 57 and an engineer) I have thought about and witnessed on uncountable times, statements that 'it can't be done'. The wisdom I gained tells me intuitively that lightning ought to and can be harnessed. We just haven't created the right tools, perhaps not the right approach to do it yet. After all, the clouds and atmosphere HAVE learned how to harness that energy, in fact create it! Maybe, for instance, we need to use a giant capacitor-like device made of 'cloud material'... mimic nature that has succeeded. Maybe we are hung-up on the idea that somehow a 'capacitor' needs to be used at all. We need to think out-of-the box to solve this one, not just use text book solutions and calculations to discount the posibilities. Humans are much more capably over time and need than you can ever imagine.

I agree with DESP 50. The problem is inventing the technology to harness such "megaphenomena". Once developed, the technology might be used to harness not only the various energies of lightning but of atomic reactions as well. Harnessing the heat,current and voltage of lightening and the heat, radiation, pressure and electromagnetic pulses of nuclear disintergration are feasable. Perhaps once that technology is developed we will move into a relm of unlimited power availability thus allowing our specis to develop as fast as our comprehension allows.

Being 65 and retired, I must agree that 'can't be done` has often been done.
However I've also seen too often that 'should be done` is subbordinate to
'would cost too much`. - if you're 57 and in the field, I'm sure you've heard,
even been forced to say that.

Considering the high voltages and frequencies, the large varience in ampereages,
the infrequency in the availabity of the resource at any given location,
..this one's a pipe dream. You'd just never see a payback on the investment.

Rather than harvesting lightning, it is the process of creating the lightning that would have to be harvested. It seems to me that lightning is a result from an accumulation of charge over a period of time. If the ability to tap and drain (through a load) the accumulation of the charge, and match this loading to the same rate of the accumulation of charge then the process should generate continuous electricity, without allowing the formation of lightning, provided your machine can find and follow the right cloud.

The problem in achieving this is how to drain charge from a significant area before break-down occurs. Essentially, the individual capacitive elements in the cloud can be considered as being isolated until the beginnings of a discharge. If we could find a way to make the cloud sufficiently conductive laterally before the field is sufficient for impulse discharge to ground (or another cloud layer), we would be able to discharge the cloud over periods of seconds or even minutes - possibly long enough for the electrical energy energy to be tapped off usefully if we can cope with the Voltage.

However, if you consider the mechanism of the charge separation, you can see that the lightning energy is only a fraction of the mechanical potential energy of the water cloud droplets and rain. Perhaps it would make more sense first to turn our attention to that as a source of energy.

simple--Not currently, or foreseeably feasible, period

What about mechanical harvesting.

Get a lightning operated solenoid to turn a big flywheel.

Or use it to pump water to a higher level from where it can be used to generate power.

I suppose the cost will exceed the normal power bill by far. but!!