So upon reading something about wind energy, I was reminded of my and my friend's energy ideas. We essentially just brainstormed and thought of great things in order to power cities. After hurricanes, geothermal, waves, and (as a joke) hamsters and animals, we came up with a great idea! Lightning!
Why not? I mean, hook up a huge lightning rod (or multiple ones) in an electrical storm area, and have it charge a giant battery. Hook the battery up to a grid, and the power stored and transferred from the lightning could power the City of Albuquerque for about 3-5 freakin' months!
My question: WHy hasn't anyone researched doing this and thought that it could be the solution to the "energy crisis" we are having?
You're not the only one thinking so, but I think the problem is that you can't just store such amounts of energy. At least we haven't found a way to do so up to now. But indeed, if you manage to find a way to store the energy of a lighting bolt, you pretty much solved energy problems ^^
Actually people have been researching this, but like hahiha said, you can't store the amount of eneergy yet. But I'm not sure how far they are with prototypes etc. Pity you never hear of researches like this.
With lightning coming down into the poles at a fast and very large rate wouldnt you be createing a very large power serge? So first you would need to find a solution to being able to absorb large amount of energy in a short period of time.
And there is no chance of a constant lighting strikes so there is no way of really knowing how much power your going to get in a month, also cant you only attract lightning further adding to my pervious arguement.
WHy hasn't anyone researched doing this and thought that it could be the solution to the "energy crisis" we are having?
Because it doesnt make money fast and because it would threaten energy companies and oil companies current hold on our energy supply. Same as all renewable sources, they get help back because of power and money. Think Im jokin or paranoid. Why dont we have electric cars? We can make them really well now and they can go just as fast as normal cars with a QUICKER 0-60, plus its cheaper and doesnt pollute. Electric cars beat the crap outta gas cars
Have people thought of this and tried? DUH. Has it failed? Of course. The main reason is the difficulty of moving the extremely high voltage effectively into the "giant battery or whatever", as well as the difficulty of actually capturing the lightning.
As a general rule, look at the wiki page before posting on anything. This particular idea is part of the lightning wiki. It highlights the problems quite nicely, though it is rather short.
It might work but the battery technology of this age will not be able to handle the 4-5gigavolts of electricity without having massive warehouses with batteries filling them to the brink. But, it a possible solution to the energy crises but only in the future.
A typical lightning bolt carries energy of a few hundred million joules. A joule is the energy that corresponds to one watt of power for one second. For example, a 100-watt bulb uses 100 joules of energy every second. An hour has 3,600 seconds in it, so a 100-watt bulb running for one hour uses 360,000 joules, and it uses 3.6 million joules in 10 hours. Of course one 100-watt bulb consumes very little energy compared to all the stuff you likely have in your house, and you're just one person!
You can probably start to see the problem - lightning bolts just don't carry that much energy relative to the rate at which we use it.
One lightning bolt can't do much. It's also hard to capture lightning at a specific spot. You can set up a "lighting tower" but you can't be guaranteed a strike.
There are additional problems. First of all, lightning is sporadic, so one can't count on it being there when one wants it. Energy would have to be collected and stored for use as needed. Unfortunately, it's not easy to convert the very high voltage of lightning to some lower voltage that we know how to deal with easily.
And the problem of converting energy is also a problem. Energy isn't all the same. I can't take the energy from lightning and use it in a lightbulb. I couldn't take the energy in static charges and run my computer.
And the problem of converting energy is also a problem. Energy isn't all the same. I can't take the energy from lightning and use it in a lightbulb. I couldn't take the energy in static charges and run my computer.
You would have to have the lightning bolt run a turbine that properly converts into the energy common households use.
If the problem with lightning is the sheer force that causes a power surge, why not try different methods in which to first suppress the energy, then collect it? Why not use rubber?
