Harnessing Lightning

[IA_Seth]

I am hoping some of the scientist types on here will be able to answer a question for me, at least provide some sort of input as to what the feasibility of such a project would be.

What is the chances of harnessing lightning to supply power? I have thought about it off and on over the last year or so and my ideas are PURELY just ideas. I do not have a big scientific background.

I am envisioning some sort of tower used to "draw" the lightning from the sky. It would seem to me that the electricity harnessed would be one BIG jolt and then nothing, so one idea would be to have that "big jolt" power some sort of gear system (similar to the way a water wheel works). I would think from that point we would have the technology needed to have the energy that was transferred from the lightning to the gear system transferred to our power grid in useable form. Or perhaps we could use the energy from the lightning to heat a metal with a high melting point, using that heat to create steam, etc.

Also, from the little I have read, it would seem magnetism would greatly affect lightning. Would there me a way to use magnetism to draw the lightning to the tower? Sort of "seed" the sky so that lightning was more likely to strike in that location?

I know it all sounds kind of crazy, and it probably is, but I keep thinking about it and wanted some real scientists to put their 2 cents in.

[TlalocW]

1. Harnessing lightning to power something

Has only been done once and that was to get the necessary 1.21 jigo-watts of electricity to power the flux capacitor to send Marty back to 1985.

TlalocW

[IA_Seth]

3. LOL

Ok, so i knew that was coming.

My brother basically said the same thing to me when I mentioned it to him.

But seriously, since ol Franklin played with electricity (along with some rather advanced French scientists at the time), has anyone really done any substantial with it?

Besides Doc?

[dumpster_baby]

2. try harnessing the effect that CREATES lightning!

The electric potential that causes lightning is caused by a sort of friction generated when droplets of water are falling though a cloud and and the wind that is in the cloud. The wind tears apart the water droplet and deposits a small electric charge on the water droplet. As these droplets accumulate in the cloud, the net charge increases, and eventually you may have a sudden release ("discharge") of electric potentil to some nearby cloud or the earth. That is lightning.

So when I read I this, I figured, why not use the wind to generate electricity here on the ground. All you need is wind and water. No moving parts. I figured you get some water out where there is a lot of wind. You pump the water into a hose set up a few feet above the ground. The hose has small pinholes along its length where the water comes out in drips. As the water drips out of the hose, the water tears at it, and a charge is deposited in the water. Of course you have a number of engineering problems here: how to isolate the water electrically, how to collect the charge, etc.

I once asked a prof whether this would work, and he said it would not because the mechanism is not efficient enough, i.e., too much work for too little voltage.

Who knows?

[IA_Seth]

4. Good Idea

Yeah, that is an interesting idea. Perhaps the initial energy required would be inefficient, but I don't see how once it was up and going that it would be self-sustaining?

Maybe I should go back and work on another degree eh?

[dumpster_baby]

7. the prof's answer was really substandard when you consider energy spent

So, NOTHING is really inefficient in and of itself: you have consider how much energy you spent GETTING the energy. True, you may only generate 1 joule of electric potential energy out for 10 joules of wind energy input; HOWEVER, that wind energy is FREE! If you have some water available in windy area (I think we can handle that!), then all the energy spent is simply time and effort spent on design; also on constructing and placing a long hose in the area, with water input; you should be able to use wind energy to pump the water into the hose.

So the energy INPUT by YOU into the system is actually NIL. I mean, the eind does all the work. And most importantly, there are no moving parts. Also, you have very little maintenance, because unlike tapping energy from the sea, or from windmills, there are not any moving parts, save the pump. And I think the water flow would be fairly low.

BTW, this is basically the same mechanism as one of those van de graff generators that charges by dripping water.

[Salviati]

8. There's no way that this could generate enough current to power the pump..

To tell the truth, according to friends of mine who do reaserch in Earth and Space Sciences, (specificly into sprites, which are related to lightning), no one really knows how lightning is created. The conditions that precede lightning are well known, including the charge seperation in the clouds, but the mechanism by which this happens is not well understood...

[olddem43]

5. Probably would never be practical for several reasons:

1. Towers of necessary size would be too costly for energy gained. 2. Each tower could only cover a limited area, so there would have to be very many.
3. Relatively infrequent lightning storms to be harnessed.
4. Problems with converting very high and varying voltages to useful power.
5. Electricity cannot be stored in any useful quantity for future use, but must be used almost instantly.

[tech3149]

6. I'm no scientist

but 25 or so years in electronics and an interest in science prompts me to answer. Since lightning is a discharge of static electrical potential generated by atmospheric conditions, it would be hard to "guide" the discharge with any degree of control. Magnetic influence would only be seen once a discharge path was established. That wouldn't help guide the discharge. A high tower would provide a more likely target, but the effect could be reduced from putting the discharge path in a similar atmospheric condition. The high tower could have less of a difference of potential than another more earthly target. A capacitive storage system would be the simplest, but not cheap. In a system like this the high voltage potential of the lightening could feed a transformer to drop the voltage and charge a battery bank. I would think in an area with high storm activity, one discharge a day might be worth about 1-3 KWH. Not much of a reward for the cost that would be needed to install a system to capture it. I could go on, but I thought I'd just star things off.