Would it be possible to take the energy from a lightning bolt to power a city or larger area?

Question

I remember watching something about lightning and how much power it could generate, I just can't remember the numbers.

Answer 1

Interesting question. Looks like some people are thinking about it. Here's a link with a section with numbers and one titled "Building a Lightning Harnessing Power Plant"

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Lightning_Power

It's always cool when there is a directly relevant link.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Even if you could predict where lightnings were going to strike, the problem is simply that lightnings have so little energy that it would not be worth it.

Even the most powerful lightnings contain the equivalent of about 10 seconds of the output of a nuclear plant. And the average lightning is thus only a few seconds of that output.

Given that we don't know when or where lightnings are going to strike, and that lightnings are few and far between on average over a year, this is not a practical source of energy.

The only example I can think of, is in Back to the Future, where they do use a lightning - but they know when and where it will strike, and it is not to power a city, but only a time machine ;-)

Hope this helps

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Answer 3

Of course it is. You just need to build a transformer the size of a New York City block (a little exaggeration) to handle the current. Lightening is a powerful electrostatic discharge - a powerful form of energy that comes in several varieties - very dangerous and unpredictable and since it NEVER strikes twice in the same place it is hard to harness. Farmers like it - puts nitrogen into the ground, for free!

I am the Fringe lightening up your life.

Answer 4

Atleast, according to latest scientific developments, you still cannot tame the lightning. It's still unbridled energy. Yea, it wud b fun to take all that energy to run a few cities. It's all in science-fiction as of now. Will take time to become a reality.

Answer 5

It would be possible, (electricity is electricity no matter what the source). The problem is storing it for controlled release. Imagine charging a million volt battery in less than a second!

Answer 6

It's several hundreds of mW, while the U. S. consumpton is 1,140 billion kWh.

However, lightning is not controllable.

Answer 7

Maybe it would be great if that happen.As lightning have lots of volts.