Can the lightning be captured and used as power source?

Question

I would like to update my knowledge in this area, that is really out-of-dated and stopped somewhere like ten years ago.

I asked the very same question on my physics lecture at my studies and got the answer, that although some tests and experiments were made (by French scientists?), there is no material, either natural or man-made, that would suffer direct lightning hit and therefore could be used to "capture" and store energy from lightning, for future use or processing of any kind.

Can someone tell me, how does it looks now? Has anything changed during last ten years in this area?

Answer 1

Basically: no cheap, efficient, large-scale battery technology exists.

This question gets asked in the world of intermittent renewable energy generation all the time, but it is even harder for lightning because of the extermely high power of the energy burst, so that's an extra problem to solve on top.

Also, how do you predict where it will strike? Build a massive antenna in every city?

The practical concerns outweigh the theoretical ones. Without a battery, you have a sudden jolt to the grid. Where does it go? You can't shut down another plant for a milisecond to save generation elsewhere.

Answer 2

An ordinary lightning rod will discharge the air during a storm, and so prevent lightning by channeling the charge into the ground through the rod. All you need to do is attach every lightning rod in a city to a rechargable battery or to an electric motor, and you extract the energy that would have been released in the lightning (that no longer happens) using the currents in the rods.

The total energy over the duration of the storm is not that high, the wattage is high, but the length of the strike is small. So there is no benefit of this over extracting power from the wind directly, as Nathaniel points out.

Answer 3

One direction to take this would be in the way of lightning propagation. Using super conductive fluid expelled from the exhaust of a 2 foot rocket in the proper conditions, say Florida, and you could induce a strike in a very controlled, accurate way. Launch it off a tower like done in this experiment, and you could potentially develop ground infrastructure to establish a "lightning farm" for harvesting power.

Clearly there are many problems as to how to capture energy, but this does solve some solutions. Check out their website. They have a lot of Amazing photographs taken of this working.

What do you people think? Time to invent the world's most capable conductive material? If you could create a massive dish, like Arecibo in Puerto Rico, of some super durable heat resistant material. It might create an irresistibly attractive single multiplied positive streamer to attract your induced lightning strike. Hopefully its unified positive attraction strength would overwhelm the forces of the misaligned flux lines which are due to the misshapen cloud undersides, and the tendency for the air (particulate matter) to force the strike in awkward directions.

Still the massive storage problem and millions O others sigh...

Answer 4

2013 costs of kWh are about .16 cents. I've read that a lightening strike generates approximately 8kWh. The profit from selling this captured power would be about $1.28. Tell me where I am wrong.

As far as converting the strike into power that is easy and can be done with existing technology. Direct the strike into a container of noble gases. Power then excites the noble gases into a rapidly expanding plasma. Increased pressure from expansion can be coupled to do mechanical work, e.g. a piston.

See Joseph Papp and his "Papp Engine."

Answer 5

fisrt know that there's a high possibility of not getting a transformer or a transmission of energy without wires(in the last fear year i learnt about that when an lightning strikes the kita the electric current goes down to the ground heating any object,thus happens by that the surface consist of electrons,the ground is having protons which then attracts the protons from the ground )the mainthing here is that there can be left electrons which then can repidly happen gradually .my conlusion is that the voltage of the lightning is very high and is very not easily eclined or transmitted when lightning strikes.