catching lightning..

Just watching some fantasy movie on channel4..

featuring a 'lightning catcher'..

It occurred to me that lightning is actually a very high energy density form of sustainable energy.

But how ,might one go about catching storing and using it?

Just an interesting idea to toss around..;'-)

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher
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The amount of energy in a lightning bolt isn't very high, it's just concentrated into a very short burst. It's not worth collecting.

Reply to
Bernard Peek

You need a kite, a key and a leyden jar...

... and someone else to hold the string!

Gordon

Reply to
Gordon Henderson

The Natural Philosopher submitted this idea :

There really is not much energy to be collected, it is so brief. They actually fire rockets with wire attached to trigger and measure the lightning.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

I thought it was several MWh..?

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

acording to google. The average strike is about 500MJ or 140 KWh.

That would keep me going for a week.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Yet another incorrect assertion from the prat who thinks he's a scientist.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Ball lightning is a very mysterious phenomenon, AFAIC.

Reply to
Gib Bogle

Are you by any chance a scientist who is also a prat?

Reply to
Gib Bogle

Its megawatts, but only for a fraction of a second. No practical electrical circuit can handle that, so the only capture option is to turn it to heat. The cost of firing a wired rocket or ereecting a big metal pole pretty much wipes out the savings, plus your hot water system gets connected to over a million volts at times, which is, erm, an issue.

There are places in the world where lightning activity is intense, it might just be worth doing something there.

NT

Reply to
NT

A good place to start is finding a popular article like this:

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following up the references to the more scientific articles mentioned.

All the proposed approaches seem to concentrate on capturing energy directly from lightning itself.

Another possible approach might be tapping off the electrical charge from storm clouds - i.e. extract electrical power in a controlled manner rather than wait for a catastrophic flashover event.

Most lightning is cloud-to-cloud, rather than cloud-to-ground - so that's the richer source to tap into. But siphon off the charge - and a suitable charge may be present in more clouds than those that actually reach the electrical potential for lightning to occur.

The difficulty remains in transforming very high DC voltages into a form that can be of commercial use.

Reply to
dom

Wherever did you find that!?..

Well they could put these new fangled lightning gatherers on top of those wind mills they shove up here and there.

Mind you the number of lightning storms in the UK make the windmills look positively reliable;)...

Reply to
tony sayer

and how often do you get a strike? Doubt it's even once per hundred years.

Given that it will save you about £15 over 100 years (even supposing you could harvest all the energy, which you can't), how much would you be prepared to pay for the equipment to do this?

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

At a guess:

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"Properties". Not it's wikipedia... but I suspect this sort of article would have the hawks watching.

Aye, we get at most two or three thuderstorms within 5 miles of here a year. The nearest known ground strikes have been more than a mile away in the ten plus years we have been here.

500MJ would just about provide our electricity demand (20kWHr/day) for a week but not water and space heating.
Reply to
Dave Liquorice

He's no scientst.

My guess is IT.

Probably Windows administrator for a bank.

Anyone who feels the need to post his cars interior on the net...

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Course it can.

Big capacitor or summat.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I have a cunning plan.

Get Prius drivers to drive into thunderstorms with long vertical metal poles connected to their batteries.

It might not work but it is worth a go.

Adam

Reply to
ARWadsworth

Heh. Why dont you work out what capacity at what voltage is needed, and what current rating, and how big it would need to be. Then explain to us how you propose to use a capacitor to store ac.

NT

Reply to
NT

Wassup? Don't you like the Prius? :-)

Reply to
The Wanderer

Big diode or summat. :-) But isn't the charge flow in the same direction for leader and return stroke, even if the strokes are in opposite directions?

I've seen a 36 phase mercury arc rectifier that could handle megawatts, but feeding it with lightning would still be an interesting challenge.

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that capacitors have been used to store some of the energy from (artificial) lightning, but it wasn't economically practical.

Reply to
Alan Braggins

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