Comment by rybosome
8 months ago
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.
> harvesting lightning as a power source
Recontextualise it as harvesting electrostatic potential from the atmosphere and you see that potential is driven by the Sun.
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.