Electricity from lightning?!

[infiitesoliduk]

Heres an idea, up to at some highlands, have large lightning rods raised to the sky collecting lightning.

 

Pass the current through a 1:10000000 ratio transformer fed into a capacitor the size of a house. wala! free CLEAN energy!!

[insane_alien]

Heres an idea, up to at some highlands, have large lightning rods raised to the sky collecting lightning.

 

Pass the current through a 1:10000000 ratio transformer fed into a capacitor the size of a house. wala! free CLEAN energy!!

 

not enough energy.

[Moltensphereearth]

not enough energy.

 

your joking right?

 

a spark from your mains socket is pretty small, just think about a lightning bolt, could supply a city or more.

 

The problem is more winding the possible 10,000,000 winds on to a transformer, that's a lot of copper, time, money and winder machine.

Edited February 17, 2011 by Moltensphereearth

[Mr Skeptic]

OK, I'll bite. How many kilowatt-hours do you think a lightning bolt contains? That's what I thought.

[Moltensphereearth]

OK, I'll bite. How many kilowatt-hours do you think a lightning bolt contains? That's what I thought.

 

Sorry. i now see your point,

 

Im not sure but if an international matrix grid was created as it's probably lightning atleast somewhere around the world at any one time, it might be ok.

I's an idea that i thought deserves investigating.

 

10,000,000 volts at say 1000Amps steped down to 240 volts would produce 41666666 Amps! at an average say 60amps per house that's 694,444 houses. A large grid of rods could cover a country. As some countries have a lot of lightning, might may sense producing.

Edited February 17, 2011 by Moltensphereearth

[Mr Skeptic]

Then just multiply the number of lightning bolts per second by the energy per lightning bolt, and compare to world electricity production. Have fun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning

 

Here's my calculation:

http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=978&q=500000000+J+*+1400000000+%2F+year&btnG=Google+Search

[Moltensphereearth]

Then just multiply the number of lightning bolts per second by the energy per lightning bolt, and compare to world electricity production. Have fun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning

 

Here's my calculation:

http://www.google.co...G=Google+Search

 

The average peak power output of a single lightning stroke is about one trillion watts. think that will keep me warm in the winter. 5 2Kwatt heaters in a house would be 10 kwatts. so that one trillion divided by 10kwats of houses. thats a whole country!! easily.

Edited February 17, 2011 by Moltensphereearth

[Mr Skeptic]

I don't think the whole country would like having electricity for only a few milliseconds at a time.

[Moltensphereearth]

I don't think the whole country would like having electricity for only a few milliseconds at a time.

 

store it in a capacitor, and use whats needed. one trillion watts is a lot of power per strike. im just saying it might be profitable.

[Nexium Tao]

Just a quick point here, what metal would you be planning on using for the windings in this transformer? Copper melts at 1084 degrees Celsius. Where as the temperature of lightning can be up to 5,000 degrees Celsius.

 

You are far better off converting the energy to heat, using it to boil steam and then using the steam to drive a turbine. But even then, the math of how much energy you could convert from an average lightning strike (Which is 10⁹J) is not very much. Which is what is actually done in this article here;

 

To quote;

 

It appears to be impractical to utilize lightning energy, as illustrated in this section. Each cloud-to-ground lightning flash involves an energy of the order of 10⁹ J. This is approximately equal to the energy required to operate five 100-W light bulbs continuously for one month: 5 x 100 W x 3600 s x 24 x 30 = 1.3 x 10⁹ J

 

or about 360 kilowatt-hours (1 kW-hr = 3.6 x 10⁶ J), probably comparable to the monthly energy consumption of an average household. Even if it were possible to capture all flash's energy (the bulk of this energy is not delivered to the strike point since it is lost to heating the air and producing thunder, light, and radio waves), one would need to attract 12 flashes to the energy storage facility in order to operate these five light bulbs for one year. The probability of lightning strike to a given point on ground is very low. For example, a 1 m² area in Florida is struck by lightning on average, once in 10⁵ years. A grounded structure protruding above earth's surface is more likely to be struck by lightning. A 60-m tower located in Florida is expected to be struck by lightning once every other year. Thus, one needs 24 such towers covering a large area of 1 km² or so to operate five 100-W light bulbs, which appears rather impractical. Most of the U.S. experiences a factor of 2 to 3 lower lightning activity than in Florida. As a result, the number of lightning capturing towers needed to operate only five 100-W bulbs in areas of moderate lightning activity would be 48 to 72. Thus the two main problems with the utilization of lightning energy can be formulated as follows:

 

(1) The power associated with a lightning flash is very high, but it is released in pulses of short duration (of the order of 10^-4-10^-5 s). As a result, lightning energy, the integral of high power over a short period of time, is rather moderate, comparable to the energy consumption by a typical household (the integral of relatively low power over a long period of time). This energy is equivalent to that released in the burning of 20 to 30 kg of oil.

 

(2) The capturing of lightning strikes would require the use of a large number of tall towers, which is rather impractical.

 

Additionally, as noted above, not all the lightning energy is delivered to the strike point. Using a typical measured value of energy per unit resistance (action integral) for negative lightning of 10⁵ A s² and an assumed range of effective resistances at the strike point of 10 to 100 Ohm, we estimate a range of the lightning energy delivered to the strike point to be from 10⁶ to 10⁷ J, which is only 10^-2-10^-3 of the total energy.

 

 

 

 

 

[steevey]

If your lightning rod could consistently draw in lightning and the energy from the lightning could be stored such as in chemical bonds which could later be used up to release that energy (sort of like with coal or the process of photosynthesis), then you could probably use energy to make electricity from those bonds in that way for a duration of time longer than a few seconds, but I doubt that kind of equipment is on the shelves for just anyone to buy.

 

Cause the problem with using electricity from lightning, is it usually is too powerful and damages stuff causing a short circuit, or as always its only energy being supplied for a few seconds or less. That's why we have solid pieces of matter which later release electrical energy, since there's already enough energy in that system which can be supplied for more than a few seconds.

Edited February 17, 2011 by steevey

[insane_alien]

it doesn't matter if you store the energy, there just isn't enough to go around till the next lightning strike.

 

lets say you have a swimming pool(standard olympic size) with a 10cm diameter hole at the deepest point, there is no input other than a random and infrequent flash flood that fills the swimming pool then stops.

 

now, after one of these flash floods, yes the pool will be full. but that little hole will still empty the whole thing long befor the next one strikes.

 

as has been mentioned before, there simply isn't a whole lot of energy there to harvest.

 

even if you had a global network of lightning collectors and assuming they had effectively infinite storage capacity (although the only input to this is from lightning) then congratulations, you can infact power up a small city. but thats it. you've used up a few giga tonnes of steel, copper, oil, etc etc building this global network to harness lightning to power a single small city. the world would be plunged into a recession far worse than anything ever before seen and resources would be so tight that governments would tearing down your towers for raw materials.

 

there was another thread where i actually done the numbers on this, I'm sure the search function will help you out.

[Moltensphereearth]

it doesn't matter if you store the energy, there just isn't enough to go around till the next lightning strike.

 

lets say you have a swimming pool(standard olympic size) with a 10cm diameter hole at the deepest point, there is no input other than a random and infrequent flash flood that fills the swimming pool then stops.

 

now, after one of these flash floods, yes the pool will be full. but that little hole will still empty the whole thing long befor the next one strikes.

 

as has been mentioned before, there simply isn't a whole lot of energy there to harvest.

 

even if you had a global network of lightning collectors and assuming they had effectively infinite storage capacity (although the only input to this is from lightning) then congratulations, you can infact power up a small city. but thats it. you've used up a few giga tonnes of steel, copper, oil, etc etc building this global network to harness lightning to power a single small city. the world would be plunged into a recession far worse than anything ever before seen and resources would be so tight that governments would tearing down your towers for raw materials.

 

there was another thread where i actually done the numbers on this, I'm sure the search function will help you out.

 

thanks mate.