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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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