Can lightning's energy caught stored and used?

Answer 1

If lightning could be fully harnessed, the energy captured could power the world. The energy in every lightning event is huge and scientists have been seeking ways to capture the energy.

There are two problems that have not been overcome and prevent lightning being useful.

The first is that the location of lightning is unpredictable. There is little point in mounting a lighting capture device (if one existed) in a location to find that lightning does not strike in that location. Guiding a lightning strike is in the same order of difficulty as taming a hurricane or altering the tides.

Next, when lighting does strike, it releases so much energy that it is almost impossible to build a device that can capture and store any of the energy. and other structures. Electrical and electronic equipment is damaged by lighting strikes and so far, attempts at capturing any part of the energy have been experimental, cumbersome and very inefficient.

The research will continue and in the future, it may be possible to see domestic energy derived from lightning. But, we have a long way to go before we see it.

In theory, a lightning does have useful energy. But I am not aware of any machine that actually makes use of it. You may have to invent one yourself. Note that you need not wait for a lightning to strike - there is an electric potential between the upper atmosphere and the ground. This is what causes lightning in the first place, but you could directly tap the electric potential instead of waiting for a lightning flash.

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In theory lightning energy could be captured and stored in a battery or capacitor for later use - BUT - there are major problems:

1) it would be exceedingly difficult to position the nodes to the exact location where the lightning would strike in order to capture the energy. Your best bet would be to try to capture the energy from a lightning rod, which is designed to be more likely to be where the lightning hits than the surrounding area. Even so, only a very small fraction of the lightning in an area would actually hit the lightning rod. (difficult to catch lightning)

2) The amount of energy in a lightning bolt is so high and delivered in such a short time (around 5 billion Joules in 30 microseconds) that it would be difficult to store that much energy that quickly. Batteries store electricity via chemical reactions and reactions do not occur instantaneously; molecules and molecular radicals can only move so fast so reactions take a noticeable finite time. You may have noticed that when you want to charge your cell phone up it takes some time - it's not instant. As a result you can only store energy in a battery at a certain rate - the rate of the chemical reaction. You would need an exceedingly large battery - or bank of batteries in parallel - to begin to capture a significant portion of the energy in such a short time. (difficult to store the energy). Recent attempts to capture and store lightning energy tried to use a combination of batteries and capacitors.

3) If the energy from lightning were stored in a large bank of batteries it would be so spread out among them that they would tend to produce only a feeble - but long lasting - current since each battery would only have absorbed a small amount of the total energy. (difficult to use the stored energy)

so - yeah - lightning energy can be caught stored and used - just not efficiently or easily

With that said - nature actually does store and use some of the energy of lighting strikes. Lighting creates a lot of ozone which is very reactive and can drive chemical reactions (energy stored in the ozone). Lightning creates nitrogen compounds which can act as natural fertilizers for plants. Lighting also powers other chemical reactions which store some of the energy of lightning in the chemical bonds of the produced chemicals. Most of the energy, however, just gets dissipated as heat.