Comment by dolphin0
Next step, use the energy?
Next step, use the energy?
Yes, thanks for repeating the content from the article.
"In addition, we aim to not only trigger and control lightning, but also to harness its energy. Future efforts will focus on developing technologies for capturing and storing lightning energy for potential use (Figure 7)."
Maybe a bank of (extremely) huge capacitors that get charged up very quickly, and are then connected to a battery pack to charge it more slowly?
Keeping control of those charges seems like a huge challenge, as they literally contain the electrical energy of a lightning bolt. I guess for physically plausible capacitors you'd also need to step the voltage way down (by six or eight orders of magnitude!?) before it reaches the capacitors. Are there physically-plausible transformers or other devices that could do that?
Or something that somehow captures the lightning as (lots and lots of) mechanical or thermal energy and then gradually converts that back into electricity?
This is never going to be economical.
Lightning is ~5GJ per strike. That means you'd need ~4 lighning strikes per hour just to keep up with a single large offshore wind turbine (15MW with 40% capacity factor).
There is also no realistic way to scale the whole thing up to significant levels of power; with the wind turbines, you just build several hundred to get into the GW range. There's simply not enough lighning to achieve that.
And the whole power buffering infrastructure that you would need would be an underutilized waste of (expensive) components.
There's never been any serious attempt at harvesting lightning at scale because a single glance at the numbers reveals how (economically) pointless an exercise it is.