Isn't it weird that we'll never (ever?) talk about lightnings as a potential renewable energy source ?

Cant predict it, cant store it, cant get it where it needs to be

That's what she said?
If we could eliminate transmission costs (superconductivity) and make energy storage trivial then it would become viable. We’d just install lightning rods around the world and plug them into the grid. We’d get a lot of power, after all.

But those are two huge “ifs.”
- So we are just a few miracles away from a less effective solution than solar, forgive me if i don’t think its worth the brain power.
Not that I think it's practical or that it should be done, but I think it's mildly interesting that Texas could be an answer to all three of those things.

Texas gets a ton of lightning, has a large battery company (Tesla), and probably needs the power the most.
- [email protected] did the math below. It's a little impractical, particularly for Tesla to engineer.

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 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 !
- A single lightning strike could power a large city for a few milliseconds. Not even seconds or minutes. Definitely not months.
Who's using conventional 100w bulbs?
- Get a 20w LED and it's just 400 hours. Better, but still not much.
- I'm a hobbyist in electronics repair. Conventional light bulbs make great AC current limiters and have a built-in indicator. 😂
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.
I thought a bolt of lightning can produce 1.21 gigawatts? Doc Brown said this in Back to the Future movie.
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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.

It would also be interesting if we had a way to greatly increase the chance of lightning in a small area, but by that point, we're probably still not justifying the cost of that R&D.
- There is that place in Venezuela where it’s pretty much always lighting.
  
  Here it is

It’s a nice idea, but it’s too unreliable. And infrequent.

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?

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.
- harder than Matt Gaetz at a elementary school luncheon
  
  god-tier analogy right there
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.

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.

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.

…shouldn’t you be in 1985?

"One point twenty one jigawatts!"

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

That's about his theory of Radiant Energy, not lightning strikes.

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.