Hi all you smarter than me people,

After having read the article by Dr Kaku regarding How advanced can a civilisation get
http://www.universetoday.com/forum/index.p...?showtopic=3001
it got me thinking and talking with my wife about how can we harness earth's natural energy.
The greatest that I know of, but I'm not that smart, is lightning. We started talking about how to capture the electical bolt and storing the energy in some sort of battery or batteries.

If I understand is correctly skyscrapers get hit regularly enough, 5 times a year? This electrical charge is then dissipated into the ground. Why can't this energy be captured?
Surely there is technology around that may not, at present, be able to contain such a large and sudden electrical charge but with some heavy thinking be altered to be able to store some of it.

Let us say the lightning rod is hit by one bolt and the energy travels down the rod to a point where the electrical charge is divided into several (might be hundreds) different points of absorption (was going to call them power stations but that might confuse the issue) and then stored or fed in a controlled manner into the power grid, what are the problems to overcome?

I know that the amount of electrical energy we are talking about is huge and very sudden.
I also know that several times in North America/Canada the power grid of large cities and states collapsed. Now switching the power back on in these cites and states also means a sudden increase of an electrical energy surge through the electrical grid. I believe that this electrical surge is only a fraction of that from an lightning bolt. But it can be done, adjusting or making new types of equipment is all that is needed. Sounds simple but probably very difficult. As I said I'm not that smart.

Does anybody know if this idea is being seriously considered by anyone?

:unsure:

I haven't seen an attempt to seriously harness lightning. My guess is that the energy expended to develop and operate such a system would be much larger than that obtained from it. There may be a way to harness wind energy with a net gain by using the potential energy from electrostatic charges which collect on appropriately designed domes in the drier climates. If they can be made to work, they'd be less noisy than rotating windmills.

__________________
For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

How much energy is in a lightning bolt? Couldn't you recreate smaller models in the lab? I'm sure synthesized lightening bolts of a smaller magnitude is possible for testing purposes. It's just a transfer of energy but usually the simplest concepts are the hardest ones to understand? Ah, I don't even understand AC/DC, accept that they mean Alternate Current and Direct Current. Why would it take more energy to absorb the energy than the energy received? The lightening bolt itself could power the entire thing so it wouldn't matter how much energy it took, so long as it wasn't greater than that of the lightning bolt.

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I am forever striving for increased perfection of my understanding of this world we live in. My quest through life is knowledge and I am but a child on this ubiquitous journey, as are we all. Knowledge, like the universe, is infinite.

Lightning bolts must come in various strengths most of which are more powerful than our grids and equipment like. It's like using a firehose for an eyedropper. Although there is an alternating component it won't have near the frequency characteristics with which our grids are compatible. We have to catch the bolt and change its characteristics to fit our grids all of which takes equipment (assuming we're clever enough to design it) that will require power to operate which reduces the efficiencies of the system. Any single gadget won't receive that many bolts to pay for its upkeep.

Let's say that a bolt lasts 2 seconds and develops 10 million voltamperes (an arbitrary choice I have no idea how typical this example is). This can convert to no more than 10000000/1800 or 5556 watt hours or 5.556 kw hours (available for only 2 seconds). If this device were exposed to an average of 100 such bolts per week, we'd get an average of 555.6 kilowatt hours/week. Since we don't know when the bolt will come we'd have to keep the equipment on several hours per week and it would have to be sturdy equipment which consumes quite a bit of energy to manufacture and maintain. Even if my arithmetic is wrong, you can see there are real pitfalls in this method of acquiring inergy.

__________________
For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

yeah...we'd be better off creating our own static electricity...do they do that?

__________________
I am forever striving for increased perfection of my understanding of this world we live in. My quest through life is knowledge and I am but a child on this ubiquitous journey, as are we all. Knowledge, like the universe, is infinite.

Gourdhead on Apr 28
Wow, that seems like very little to capture for the effort. I can save 140 kilowatt hours/week per house just with proper placement of less than $100 of kitchen foil in the attic space. B)

__________________
Pre-Quote: 'To survive one has to experiment. When the environment changes, the traditional way of doing things doesn't work.'

Quote:
"It's the outriders, the organisms that seem to be maladjusted before the change, which are the only ones that survive these changes...in that way a species continues."

Carl Sagan

I hesitate to respond, because that must make you either one of the dumbest people ever (and having read your post I guess you must have been joking), or you weren't referring to most people in this forum,including me.

Your question of harnessing lightning has been considered, but as others have said extremely difficult. However there is another (or actually the same) electric energy source. The so called 'fair weather potential gradient". This gradient amounts to 100 Volt/m in the atmosphere up to (I think) 100km, so there is already an enormous powergrid that could potentially be tapped continuously.

How this global field is generated is unclear, but it is thought that thunderstorms keep the field powered, although some think (and I think this could very well be true) that the field is powered from space (the Sun/solar wind), because the strange lightning called "elves", "sprites" and blue jets is actually directed away from Earth. Thunderstorms would then be a means to release energy and keep the power balanced.

How we could tap this source is probably by buiding very tall buildings or towers (mountains), but the danger is that this could work as a lightning rod with potentially disastrous consequences, because an enormous amount of electrical power is available. I guess it has been tried, but I don't know what the problems are. I do know that the Space Tether experiment (where this power was tried to be tapped by extending miles of cable from a satelite) went wrong because of the strong current in the cable. It basically got zapped.

Maybe someone can explain why this concept can't possibly work, because if it could, Im sure we would have known about it.

Cheers.

I can't recall the exact reference, but due to a defect in the tether, I believe a from a kink (or thin spot in the insulation), the tether shorted out. Proof of the considerable voltage potential, and further proof that we have to do everything right in space to get the results we want. B)

__________________
Pre-Quote: 'To survive one has to experiment. When the environment changes, the traditional way of doing things doesn't work.'

Quote:
"It's the outriders, the organisms that seem to be maladjusted before the change, which are the only ones that survive these changes...in that way a species continues."

Carl Sagan

That's the official version, but they actually underestimated the current and no matter what tether they will use, once a current flows it'll get fried. I believe that a second tether experiment is due this year. Let's wait and see.