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Capture and store the energy from Lightning?

21 Mar 09 | Technology

A few years ago, I was having a conversation with my brother in law about wind mills and solar panels and he stated “Why can’t we just use the electricity in lightning?”  To which my answer was of course, there is no way to safely do that.  Then I thought about it.  Lightning has a large EMP (ElectroMagnetic Pulse) component that travels some distance away from the actual lightning strike.  In fact, most equipment damage cause by lightning is due to induced currents on power and telephone transmission lines, not direct strikes.

What if say, around tall metal structures like radio and TV transmitting towers, arrays of EMP capturing devices connected to banks of large capacitors were employed.  During a lightning strike the capacitors would become charged, then they could slowly discharge there stored energy to the electrical grid using grid tied inverters.  Of course, this would work best in an area where there is a lot of lightning to begin with, like Florida, for example.

The average lightning strike disipates about 1 Terawatt of power in about 20-40 microseconds.  The magnetic field generated from this event travels out uniformly from the strike point disipating exponentially as a function of distance.  Therefore, the closer to the stike point, the higher the field and the greater yield potential.  To store any meaningful amount of power, a massive capacitor bank, or capacitor bank and battery bank connected in parallel would be needed.

Perhaps some further research is in order.

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21 Mar 09 | Technology | Comments (0)