• Question: If lighning produces so much energy, couldn't mankind harness it?

    Asked by wizzyg12 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Kate Husband

      Kate Husband answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I can see a few potential problems with trying to use the energy from lightening.

      1. We don’t know when or where its going to strike, so presumably the detector needs to be portable.
      2. It produces a lot of energy over a very short time so you will need to store that energy to use later.
      3. A lot of the energy of the lightening bolt goes into heating the air on the way down so we are going to lose a lot of the lightening’s energy.

      That said it seems people have thought about this before. There is some more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy and in the links at the bottom of the article.

    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Like Kate says, storage of energy is a problem. Normally power companies try to predict when people will use more power (for example, during the World Cup when people get up during half-time to make a cup of tea) and produce more power during that time (either by burning more coal or letting more water out of hydroelectric dams). But if you can’t control when lightning will happen, it’s very difficult to use that in a useful way.

    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Despite being a very nice idea, it’s not very practical. One serious problem that we haven’t mentioned yet is that most of the world is covered by water, not land. This means that most of the lightning strikes will happen on the oceans and there’s no way we’d be able to capture that energy even if we could predict the strikes, let alone transport it to somewhere useful.

Comments