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, 🤷‍♂️.

  • skeld@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      I double-checked and you’re entirely right, i didn’t know that, i’ve heard many years ago that a single big lightning strike could power a large city for months(, while it’s indeed more a matter of minutes, if not less), and thought that it was a technological problem(, and that, e.g., flying devices anchored on the ground to either a portable infrastructure or a nationwide-extended network, could potentially make up for the unreliability and follow the storms, or even perhaps cause them one day).
      Now i understand even better why solar power is preferred, thanks !

      • Technoguyfication@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        A single lightning strike could power a large city for a few milliseconds. Not even seconds or minutes. Definitely not months.

        • AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          So if I’m wearing an Arduino to power some LED’s for cosplay, how often do I have to get struck by lightning to keep it going?

        • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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          1 year ago

          I think my LEDs are around 6W? So what would that be? 1,333 hours per LED. Or my 3000W oven for 2 hours and 40 minutes.

          Yeah, we would need a lot of lightning strikes. My solar panels generated about 34,000kWh today, or 4.25 lightning strikes.

      • skeld@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m a hobbyist in electronics repair. Conventional light bulbs make great AC current limiters and have a built-in indicator. 😂

    • Lopoloma@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      1,400,000,000 strikes earth every year

      According to https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/thunder-and-lightning/facts-about-lightning

      That would be barely 45 strikes each second.
      That’s four magnitudes away from your cited goal of powering earth.

      The reason noone talks about harnessing lightning as a power source is the diminishing returns on top of its unreliability and it being demanding on the tech it would need - which we know for decades now.

      My conclusion is OP didn’t research google his question first.

  • Cosmonaut_Collin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • some_guy@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • What083329420@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • lntl@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ben_dover@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    i’ve brought it up with different engineers, everyone said it’s basically impossible, it is just too strong

  • Yo la tengo @lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • DontAskAboutUpdog@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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      1 year ago

      You couldn’t predict it, but you can kind of coax where it will strike with lightning rods. If you could send the power to a battery of some kind to be discharged when needed, that’d be handy. Never hurts to have extra energy lying around in storage.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      More like a fire cracker compared to a nuclear reactor, lightning isn’t all that powerful.

  • Cam@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Cam@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.