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, 🤷♂️.
Unless you can control the weather which if it was possible, would likely take lots of energy ans is the only way to make a “lightning power plant” to my understanding.
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.
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?
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.
Remember how hard it was to capture a lightning bolt in Back to the Future movie? The only reason they succeeded was because they knew when and where lightning will strike in a week and they timed it out perfectly.
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
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.
Lightning has a peak power of 1TW for 30 microseconds according to Wikipedia, corresponding to an energy content of about 8000 Watt-hours. That is enough to run a 100 watt conventional light bulb for 80 hours, so not actually much energy. You would need to capture about half a million lightning strikes a second if you wanted to power the world that way, for example.
I thought a bolt of lightning can produce 1.21 gigawatts? Doc Brown said this in Back to the Future movie.
