Lightening Power Station

Someone thinks they have had a great idea.

Why don’t we use lightening to feed into the grid and use it as a source of energy?  I think I may have solved the worlds energy needs!

Apr 28th, 2010

One pearl of wisdom on “Lightening Power Station”

  1. Consultant K Says:
    April 28th, 2010 at 12:33 pm

    What we are after is Watts! Lightening has a very very high voltage but a relatively low amperage. Multiply the two together and you get power (watts). Though it is not a small amount of power you will get it only exists for a very short time.
    Lots of figures are out there but lets run with the following
    1,000,000volts, 40,000amps and lasts for 1/10th of a second.
    Volts times Amps gives us the Watts
    Using the above we therefore have 40,000MW which is a lot but then we have the time factor which brings that down to a little over 1MW hours which is still a lot. But then when we put that strike into a house over a year it will only provide 126Wh for a year.
    But then we have to take into account all the losses from the system. Energy from the strike lost to noise, light and inefficiencies in the system. Then how do we capture it? We would need to have spikes all along the grid waiting to collect it, rectify it to the grids phase and drop it in.

    All in all it is a nice idea but not one that is practical.

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