Comment by ahahahahah
20 hours ago
Yes, thanks for repeating the content from the article.
"In addition, we aim to not only trigger and control lightning, but also to harness its energy. Future efforts will focus on developing technologies for capturing and storing lightning energy for potential use (Figure 7)."
isn't conventional wisdom that this is "impossible" because you cannot charge batteries that fast?
Like most things, you’d probably end up heating water somehow and using that energy.
If the energy is going into batteries. It doesn’t necessarily have to.
Also, technology continues to improve, and this isn’t a “next year” thing.
Maybe a bank of (extremely) huge capacitors that get charged up very quickly, and are then connected to a battery pack to charge it more slowly?
Keeping control of those charges seems like a huge challenge, as they literally contain the electrical energy of a lightning bolt. I guess for physically plausible capacitors you'd also need to step the voltage way down (by six or eight orders of magnitude!?) before it reaches the capacitors. Are there physically-plausible transformers or other devices that could do that?
Or something that somehow captures the lightning as (lots and lots of) mechanical or thermal energy and then gradually converts that back into electricity?
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