Comment by janalsncm
1 day ago
Apparently a single lightning strike contains the equivalent of about 40 gallons of gasoline. It’s very powerful but not that significant on the scale of a whole city.
In fact a quick back of the napkin math suggests it would only power a city of a million people for half a second.
This comment made me wonder about the idea of harvesting lightning as a power source. Obviously it’s incredibly challenging, but I wondered if we had magic sci-fi technology that allowed it, how useful would it be?
Back of the napkin math suggests that even with theoretically perfect prediction, capture, storage and distribution you’d still get at best ~1% of the US’ energy through lightning capture.
We don't even universally accept that sun and wind could be enough to power everything we ever want to do. Not sure how well lightning harvesting will be received.
I wonder what the average property damage is per strike. And if forcing lightning reduces or changes storm power. Maybe for preventative reasons you put them outside of towns and such.
Maybe to avoid wildfires caused by lightning strikes, happens a lot up here in BC.