Is it possible to harness energy from lightning

Another problem is storing the energy and converting it. Subscription Notification. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details.

Please update your billing details here. Please update your billing information. The average lightning strike contains about 1 million joules, enough energy to fry the founding father in his boots. Unfortunately, relying on lightning bolts to power our hair dryers, TVs, and refrigerators would be far from cost effective. The problem is that the energy in lightning is contained in a very short period of time, only a few microseconds.

Further, to obtain that 1 million joules, one would have to handle a voltage of several million volts. Absorbing lightning and converting it to useful energy would be an extraordinary challenge, Kirtley explains.

It would require complex capture and storage facilities and distribution systems that in the end would unlikely yield enough energy to justify their expense. Then, even if we could design a battery that would not be vaporized by the strike, all the lightning in the world would still power only a small fraction of households. But actually, only a fraction of that energy is in the form of electrical current—much of the energy goes to heating the air.

And the process of storing the energy in a battery and then retrieving it is pretty inefficient. The equipment to capture the electrical energy in a strike would have to handle the extreme amount of charge in only around 30 milliseconds approximate duration of a lighting strike. To handle that kind of instantaneous power, heavy conduction rods would need to be used, with ultra-heavy-duty electrical circuits and storage super-capacitors.

Not to mention installation costs and regular maintenance, as well as the wire grid connecting all the towers together, and the havoc that will cause with air traffic More money than the world has! In comparison, one hour of sunlight has the same amount of energy that we use in a year!

We have much more power available from the sun and we only need our rooftops to accumulate all we need.