In the woes of our perpetual energy crisis, have you ever been in the middle of a thunderstorm and thought why not just capture lightning? That's a lot of power right there.
The idea first struck me (no pun intended) when I was watching the 2007 fantasy film Stardust. If you're unfamiliar, there's a scene in the movie where flying ships are soaring through the sky collecting lightning. The captured bolts are then sold off for money. I for one was taken by the idea.
When I did an initial search on the idea, the first fact I stumbled on was that one bolt of lightning could toast 100,000 pieces of bread. I thought that's great. I mean, who doesn't love toast?
Of course, as with most research, a deeper dive into the subject produced less desirable results.
According to an article from Real Clear Science, there are 1.5 billion lightning bolts flashing in our atmosphere each year. Only a fourth of those will ever touch ground. Each spark going from cloud to ground contains roughly 1 billion Joules of energy. MIT professor James Kirtley places estimates closer to 1 million Joules for the average strike, but let us just say 1 billion is the correct number. Given that the typical American household consumes 41 billion Joules of energy a year, and there are 114 million households in the U.S., then there is a required 4.72 x 10^18 Joules each year. If we were to somehow capture every one of those 1.5 billion bolts without any loss of the 1 billion Joules they contain, we would have harnessed 4.0 x 10^17 Joules of energy.
All those big, round numbers have one conclusion: if we managed to can every lightning bolt in the world, it would only power 8 percent of American households. Not even 8 percent of the entire world's households -- just America alone.
Of course, that would only be if we first figured out how to capture and store lightning. Lightning strikes, as we have all witnessed before, happen in milli- or even microseconds. It is not a billion joules slowly dissipated over time -- it's a billion joules in one climatic instant. Capturing that energy in that instant would require a huge capacitor for storage. The energy would then have to be converted to alternating current to be slowly released. Add in the efficiency loss in the conversion, and storing lightning becomes not only unfeasible, but also results in lower available energy.
One company did, however, manage to simulate storing lighting in late 2013. Information technology company Nokia Corp., paired with scientists from the University of Southampton in the U.K., charged a cell phone with simulated power from natural lightning.
On simulating the characteristics of lightning, Neil Palmer of the University's Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory commented,
We used a high-voltage alternating current (AC) source to break down the air and to pass a current through it, giving off losses of light, heat and sound energy similar to that produced by visible lightning. This discovery proves that the device can be charged with a current that passes through the air, and is a huge step towards understanding a natural power like lightning and harnessing its energy.
This experiment, as great as it was, failed to address one of the main troubles with lightning: unpredictability. As if the engineering involved in storing the lightning wasn't enough, structures involved in capturing the bolts would be just as complex. To attract the lightning, tall, durable metal poles would have to be erected. Yet lightning occurs most frequently in tropical or mountainous regions, both of which are difficult to build in. And knowing exactly where each bolt will strike in the forests and mountains is an even more impossible task.
Ultimately, with the technology available to us today, harnessing lightning is, regrettably, an unfeasible task.
Still, I wait for the day we'll be making 100,000 pieces of toast. And maybe in the time it takes for a lightning bolt to flash?