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This is my first posting here.

Out of curiosity, most of the postings that I have read are about indirect electricity: be it fuel cell, petrol or hydroelectric. All need extra energy to transform it from one energy to another.

What about lightning? Not the lighting we used at home, but as in thunder and lightning.

Lightning seems to be a form of direct electricity to me, if we could manage to store it. Is it not a waste of energy for lightning to pass through a lightning rod to Earth??? Is there a way to store this energy in a useful manner?

[edited for grammer and spelling, Tyler_JC]

searching for (lighning power) on www.halfbakery.com results in 60 hits. Many of these are, indeed, ideas for doing exactly this. And people who post 'duplicate' ideas, or those that already exist or have been written about before, are encouraged to deleate them.

Yeah, that's my point.

I believe there is a lightning "field" in New Mexico, an art installation made up of hundreds of steel poles, all gathered to, in essence, provide control points for lightning. Interesting stuff.

www.lightningfield.org

awhile ago we had a post where someone ran the numbers and found that the amount of power generated would be negligible because lightning doesn't strike consistently and often enough in a specific area. also because of the inefficiencies of converting electricity @ 100000+ volts into something we can use.

fossil_fuel wrote:awhile ago we had a post where someone ran the numbers and found that the amount of power generated would be negligible because lightning doesn't strike consistently and often enough in a specific area. also because of the inefficiencies of converting electricity @ 100000+ volts into something we can use.

Yes. This is something you get asked regularily if you're a physics student - a lot of people seem to think it's an original idea.

If you want to come up with a new "alternative" source of energy, you're best off trying to think of something that you can turn into steam, or more generally, something that turns easily into rotational motion, because that's how practically all of our elecricity generation still works. Most people don't realize that even things like nuclear power are really not, at the basic level, high-tech at all; a nuclear reactor is really just a hot lump of stuff that runs a steam turbine.

It may not need to be lightning... but something close.

Lightning 101:
Lightning is really just an electrical arc... a temporary bridging of a huge voltage drop between earth and clouds, with a pretty good insulator (air) in between. This happens, of course, because air isn't a perfect insulator. In fact, humid air, with raindrops falling through it, is a better conductor than dry air. Thunderstorms act as huge dynamos, creating electrical potential between the troposphere and the stratosphere (two layers of atmosphere). Most lightning happens between these two layers as they seek a balance in charge. But with a few thousand feet separating the lowest portion of a thundercloud from the Earth, the arc can happen between the Earth and the clouds.

But you don't need an arc to happen for balancing to occur. Higher layers of atmosphere have a different electrical charge than the Earth, even on clear days. This voltage differential is nowhere near as big as during a storm, but it can be significant, nevertheless. All we have to do is to bridge the gap through the atmosphere with a conductor. Some people have brainstormed about an idea of floating a balloon up with a conductive metal tether grounded in the earth. Basically, it would be like a huge lightning rod. (Lightning rods are not installed to attract lightning, but to prevent it. They prevent lightning by shedding negative ions from the earth into the sky, keeping the difference in electrical potential below the point at which lightning would occur.)

So... this idea isn't technically harnessing lightning itself, but harnessing the electrical potential that - in higher levels - causes lightning to occur.

One big problem is storage, always has been.

Let's say that for electric vehicles to go as far as conventional vehicles do on petrol (gasoline for US folks), battery/storage technology has to improve by 2 orders of magnitude (at least 100x). Last I heard, leading companies are still trying hard (Panasonic, Maxwell, etc).

In order to capture lightning, you would need batteries that are the stuff of legend - or, let's just say, 4 orders of magnitude (10000x) better, in all areas - energy density, recharge rate, etc. Or to put it simply, "being able to charge up to 100% in 0.1 second without blowing to bits, kaboom" ...

... and here I am, marvelling at my new Energizer 1-hour charger that charges my 4xAA Ni-MH batteries in 1 hour instead of the 15 hours like the old charger needed. Ah well, we still have a *very* long way to go.

Caoimhan wrote:... this idea isn't technically harnessing lightning itself, but harnessing the electrical potential that - in higher levels - causes lightning to occur.

Right, and if you're into the tin-foil hat stuff, there're folks out there talking about how the universe is electric, and that "all the energy is everywhere" (though it definitely "doesn't belong to us", lol, arggh, another "All Your Base" reference, who'll get it?), and how Tesla's "missing" ideas talked about harnessing that electric potential.

Other, more level-headed (not much more perhaps) folks discussing building Arthur C. Clarke-style "space elevators" have also wondered about its "other feature" as a gigantic lightning rod.

... and hi, lynntan, welcome on board ...

but wasn't it lightning that doc Brown used to send the DeLorean back to the future...??

Clever monkeys we are--always scheming for our next free lunch. Besides, I bet if even we were able to harness lightning (which I don't believe is possible) we would become dependent on it and before long the collective demand from all of our newly powered "lightning" gadgets would exceed the supply.

>>Peak Lightning<<

Damnit! We can't win

You don't need super-batteries. The performance profile you mention is more in the lines of a supercapacitor. Use the supercapacitor to catch the nearly instantaneous energy surge, then bleed the capacitor slowly into batteries.

Although I agree that Lightning is an inefficient source of energy, (one bolt has the equivalent of 30 kg of oil in energy), you could use lightning rockets.

Project something into the air, it acts like a 5000 foot lightning rod temporarily, the lightning hits it.

It's been done before.

Still, not a viable source of energy on a large scale.