Seems to my ignorant eyes that we could always somehow split the power received into more manageable units, even if it has to be splitted a million times, 🤷♂️.
Cant predict it, cant store it, cant get it where it needs to be
That’s what she said?
If we could eliminate transmission costs (superconductivity) and make energy storage trivial then it would become viable. We’d just install lightning rods around the world and plug them into the grid. We’d get a lot of power, after all.
But those are two huge “ifs.”
Not that I think it’s practical or that it should be done, but I think it’s mildly interesting that Texas could be an answer to all three of those things.
Texas gets a ton of lightning, has a large battery company (Tesla), and probably needs the power the most.
skeld@lemmy.world did the math below. It’s a little impractical, particularly for Tesla to engineer.
I think the difficult part with harnessing lighting is the consistency of it. We would need to build in places where thunderstorms are common, which will only be true for particular seasons. The other limitation is the battery technology that we currently have. It could be a better resource if we could find a way to store electricity in a non-degrading system. I think the new solid state batteries are supposed to be that way, but I don’t know enough about them or this topic to really say. Alternatively, we can just pump people full of radiation until one of them becomes a weather controlling mutant so we can have infinite thunder storms.
It would also be interesting if we had a way to greatly increase the chance of lightning in a small area, but by that point, we’re probably still not justifying the cost of that R&D.
There is that place in Venezuela where it’s pretty much always lighting.
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It’s a nice idea, but it’s too unreliable. And infrequent.
No it’s not weird that we don’t talk about harnessing something that we can’t predict more than a few seconds in advance.
Do you also think it’s weird we don’t plan our entire day to avoid getting hit by meteorites?
You can farm lighting with a model rocket. Hell, the Empire State Building gets struck several times a year.
We just don’t have anything that can capture and store that much power easily, and smoothing that power into stable, reliable energy would be harder than Matt Gaetz at a elementary school luncheon.
harder than Matt Gaetz at a elementary school luncheon
god-tier analogy right there
I know you are sorta joking, but humans collectively have spent billions on mapping out our solar system with the explicit goal of predicting meteorites. There is active monitoring trying to see meteorites before they hit. And it is actually a fulltime job for a lot of people to plan for, scan for and predict meteor impacts.
Good thing is, we are very good at it. We know pretty much for sure there isn’t going to be a big impact for the next 100 years caused by an object in our solar system. They are currently working on sizes that would cause a big issue if it were to hit a city. Of course chances such an impact would be in the ocean or a less densely area are big, but still it’s good to check.
Wondered the same, learned its too unreliable where it hits and not consistant enough. Thats also a big issue with renewable energy now, we dont have a proper way to store overloads and have to acually waste it currently.
Voltage rises with altitude, it’s theoretically possible to raise one end of a well insulated wire very high into the sky and jam the other end into the Earth to draw current from the sky.
This isn’t exactly harnessing lighting, more like harvesting the energy in lightning before it strikes.
…shouldn’t you be in 1985?
“One point twenty one jigawatts!”
Nikola Tesla had this back in 1887. Big business couldn’t figure out how to make enough money off it so it died out.
RADIANT ENERGY - UNRAVELING NIKOLA TESLA’S GREATEST SECRET: https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/radiant-energy-unraveling-nikola-teslas-greatest-secret
That’s about his theory of Radiant Energy, not lightning strikes.
There’s a retired astronaut whose entire post-NASA career has been devoted to developing a plasma propulsion engine. Which is kind of (though not exactly) what you’re thinking of.
i’ve brought it up with different engineers, everyone said it’s basically impossible, it is just too strong
Lighning to a power generator is what atomic bomb is to a nuclear reactor. If you had no means of predicting when and where the bomb will go off.
There are so many better options.
More like a fire cracker compared to a nuclear reactor, lightning isn’t all that powerful.
