Capturing Lightning

None that I know of, other than charging flux capacitors...

Perhaps a large hammer of unknown material...?

Nikola Tesla was born during a lightning storm. He was very much into mega volts. If anyone would have tried to harness lighting he would have been the guy. I see no record of him doing so, so the field seems wide open for innovation. Electrical storage at those levels will require some inventing, but maybe a chemical solution would be easier. A lot of ozone is produced by a strike, and ozone is highly reactive. So:

1. Capture the ozone

2. generate electricity by an ozone reaction

The average lightning strike has a certain amount of energy and a certain amount of power. The energy is what is useful, the power causes all the problems. Power = Energy / time, and the time is very short, hence the Power is extremely high.

The energy is on the order of gigajoules, but this energy is released in milliseconds.

By far not all the energy of a lightning strike can be captured. A considerable fraction is dissipated by ionizing a column of air that may be miles long.

"Can we harvest the energy of lightning?

UP NEXT Lightning packs a huge amount of power - 5 billion joules of energy in a single bolt to be exact. Check out these amazing lightning pictures! ISTOCKPHOTO/THINKSTOCK

A single bolt of lightning contains 5 billion joules of energy, enough to power a household for a month. The energy of a thunderstorm equals that of an atom bomb. If we're already generating power from unexpected sources like ocean currents in our quest to wean ourselves of polluting- and limited- fossil fuels, why not pull electricity from the air, especially when everyone can see it lighting up the night sky?

If you've pondered that question, you're not the first. In 2007, a company called Alternative Energy Holdings tried to make it happen, with a design that involved a tower, grounding wires and a capacitor. But, CEO Donald Gillispie told the New York Times:

Quite frankly, we just couldn't make it work...Given enough time and money, you could probably scale this thing up. It's not black magic; it's truly math and science, and it could happen.

The logistical problems involved in making it work are significant. First of all, there's the basic fact that thunder storms are sporadic and lighting strikes random; considering that energy demands are steady, dependable energy sources are preferable.

Second, it's not so easy to capture energy delivered in one enormous blast in a split second. It has to be stored and converted to an alternating current, without blowing out the collection system in a single large strike.

Third, the energy contained in a lightning bolt disperses as it travels down to Earth, so a tower would only capture a small fraction of the bolt's potential. In the end, barring the development of a technology that could capture the energy from lightning before it strikes, it's probably best to focus on other, more earthly sources of energy."

https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/harvest-energy-lightning.htm

"Lightning packs a huge amount of power - 5 billion joules of energy in a single bolt to be exact."

Who writes this baloney? First, energy ≠ power. Second, there is nothing exact about any of this. All possible observations have large error bars.

That said, 5B joules = 5B watt-seconds = 5M kW-seconds ≈ 1390 kWh. This is about what a home might use in a month (± a lot). Gillispie's summary makes sense.

You're right, writers for the layman tend to play fast and loose with the engineering terms like energy and power.

I see the value of 5 Gigajoules as the energy of the average lightning bolt. The question I have is "Does this value represents the total energy released as it jumps an air gap of a couple of miles and hits the ground or is it the remaining energy available at the strike point after energy has been dissipated creating plasma and thunder?".

FROM: https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=2280&t=energy-of-a-lightning-strike

"The energy of an average 3 mile-long lightning strike is one billion to ten billion joules. To keep a 100-watt light bulb going for one second, one hundred joules of energy will be used. With one billion joules, the light bulb will be lit for 116 days."

I don't know what national averages are for electricity bills but calling this US$30 worth of electricity should be a reasonable order of magnitude. I'm having a hard time seeing a business model for selling stored strikes.

Trying to harvest all of the charge from a passing thunderstorm would give you a lot more charge but I have my doubts about it giving you a better business model.

Maybe my math is in error,but I get:

1J = 2.777778⋅10^-7kWh = (1/3600000)kWh.

For 1 billion Joules,that's 277.77777778 KWH.

At the average price of 1 KWH at about $.10,that is $2.78 per strike.

Assuming over 50% loss,that is still about a buck per strike.

Tall buildings as well as communication towers get frequent strikes,which is shunted to the ground.

As for those that say a strike does not have much power,I have seen giant trees split wide open due to the vaporization of the sap.

If this heat could be stored in a liquid;salt or water,or perhaps hydrogen through hydrolysis, it may be lucrative.

As stated in my original post,most frequent strikes are in the tropics,with some areas in Venezuela getting multiple strikes per hour.

These would be the most profitable sites.

Tesla said the air was full of energy and he was attempting to harness it;Perhaps by extraction from the ionosphere.

No one really knows how his towers were intended to function,but they were quickly dismantled and destroyed,and his files seized by the government.

Very little of his structures survived,even in museums.

I would imagine if he had succeeded,current energy suppliers would not exist.

Marconi stole his ideas for radio transmission,and his patent was subsequently revoked,posthumously and awarded to Tesla;Too late to help Tesla.

Marconi got credit for the first transatlantic radio transmission,and Tesla's funding for his project dried up.

Westinghouse convinced him to tear up his contract with him for $.01 per hp per motor produced.

One of mankind's greatest inventors died penniless,but his legacy lives on every time we turn on a light switch or an A/C electric motor.

Had you started with 5B joules, you would have gotten the same answer as I got.

Obviously.

I did not question your answer,only my own math,but it seems we are in agreement on the conversion to KWH.

Multiply my answer by 5 and it matches your answer precisely.

OOPS! My math is wrong by a factor of 10.Decimal point in wrong place for dollar amount..Should be 27.80 per 1 billion joules,or $139 per 5 Giga Joule lightning strike.

If there were a smaller scale device available then there might be a possibility.

Most major electrical grids will have earth lines located above the power conductors, there specifically to attract the lightning strikes and protect the actual grid lines. Thus if a device were invented that was reasonable it could be retrofitted to existing infrastructure.

Secondly, many grids also have "spark gap" devices on the active conductor to shunt high voltage from strikes away from the line. Again, there is already an interface point possible for power collection.

The real problem as has always been the case is the investment necessary to gain a miniscule amount of power per device per year. A single 250W solar panel with lower complexity and predictable yield and serviceability just beats this hands down.

Actually a better solution would be to harness the static electricity from the clouds before it becomes a strike. How would this be achieved, well use large dirigibles suitably tethered to hopefully overcome the forces of the winds and to provide another device to catch the unwary pilot. Maybe make the tether like a spider web to drain more charge from the clouds and catch bigger planes to ease the burden of green house gasses.

Lightning is a DC discharge and as has been shown often a leader, practically invisible rises from the ground to the cloud and the strike we see is the discharge down the ionised leader.

Where do they get the average strike value from for there is no such thing as an average strike as was found in the early 20th century by experimentation with a large tower erected on insulators and shunted to ground through DC shunts where the current was measured and the value of the surge voltage calculated. From these experiments individual strikes were found to vary by a factor of ten. There were a number of books written on the experiments and I did read some, a wasted youth some might say, but it fascinated me.

I was involved in making a test set to check 11Kv arresters with short duration DC pulses generated by capacitors being charged in parallel and then discharged in series to give a millisecond pulse of high voltage across the device under test.

The particles moving past each other in the clouds generates the static electricity much like the glass beads or garnet in a sand blasting machine generate their own form of static electricity went they impact the item being blasted.

"Actually a better solution would be to harness the static electricity from the clouds ..."

I think the physisist John Galt did something somewhat similar to this (actually at ground level, and no clouds but still similar) back in the late 1950's when he built an electric motor that ran off the static electricity that is always present in the air which surrounds us.

TBC

John Galt is a fictional character from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I have seen speculation that Nikola Tesla was her model for the idea, but I don't know if she ever said so.

Ayn Rand's John Galt was (in this great work of fiction) also, in reality as evidenced today, virtually a social prophet (look about you, right now).

That said, his "fictional" static electricity powered engine was also prophetic in that research TODAY is, in fact, progressing toward that very goal. I recently (within the last few months) saw where power was actually captured (and used) from the static electricity contained in the air -- although the accomplishment was at a micro x micro level at best and had not been independently repeated, it is amazing evidence that the research is ongoing. Sorry I can no longer supply a link to the article.

The terrestrial electric field is about 100 volts/meter, even in fair weather. The atmosphere is the dielectric of a giant capacitor with the plates being the ionosphere and ground. The voltage is there but the current available is extremely small, so that ultra high impedance instruments are required to measure it.

I recall reading of an autopilot for a model airplane back in the 1970's that used the electric field to level the aircraft, long before anyone could dream of the gyro stabilization of today's drones.

https://www.jhuapl.edu/Content/techdigest/pdf/V05-N02/05-02-Hill_Electro.pdf

High frequency? Actually, Mildred, it's DC all the way.

Lightning consists of many individual pulses in both directions,but occur so fast we see only a flicker.

This initial pre-strike(from a negative cloud) is from the cloud downward towards the Earth.

It is met by a upward positive pulse of electricity.

That's right, the real power from a lightning strike is UPWARD,not downward.

There is also a strong magnetic field associated with it which does can cause damage(EMF) at a distance without ever striking the object.

Perhaps a method will be developed to capture both the electrical and magnetic potential of lightning strikes.

Well, I'd study more along the recommendations in number 11 below, Mildred. Then, I'm funny that way.

It's okay with me if you study, Mr Heath.('Allo'Allo!)

Let me know what you find.

Check out Dr. Emmet Brown's 1955 work on capturing the energy from a lightning bolt with his (un?)-patented "Flux Capacitor".

TBC

Ha! All that is needed is some industrial strength cable, an improvised pantograph and an alarm clock now.

I don't see how they could possibly get 1.21 GW out of a single lightning strike...?

Why not? Gigawatts are not a measure of energy.

For instance a million volts times a thousand amps is a gigawatt. But if it lasts only a second, it's not so huge an amount of energy.

I don't think the wire would handle it.....

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/05/could-we-harness-lightning-as-an-energy-source.html

Lightning is a very fast high energy pulse....multiple pulses,actually,of alternating polarity.

Perhaps using a Tesla-like coil as a receiver,and a single turn secondary to step down the voltage.

The secondary would have to to be very robust to handle the increased current,and the primary would have to have very high insulation ability.

Perhaps both could be oil cooled and insulated.

Positive Ion emitters could be used to attract the lightning.

Maybe this was what Tesla was thinking when his funds were cut off.

"Electricity is in the air"

Arthur C Clark proposed a Space Elevator many years ago,but the materials and technology did not exist at the time to build it.

Now with the increasing development of carbon nano fibers,it may become possible.

So why not try to harness some energy from the ionosphere?

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was once asked when the "space elevator," a notion he helped to popularize, would become a reality. Clarke answered, "Probably about 50 years after everybody quits laughing." Nowadays NASA scientists are taking the idea seriously.

Probably the same with ionosphere energy harvesting.