Harvesting lightning energy

Since the late 1980s, several attempts have been made to harness the energy of lightning. Although a single flash a large amount of energy has ( some 5 billion joules or energy, which is located in 145 liters of gasoline ), it is an extremely small place and time concentrated ( millisecond). It has been suggested that the energy of a flash is used to produce hydrogen from water, or to use the fast heated by the hot water to generate electricity or capture by inductors placed near a secure fraction of the energy.

A technology which is capable to use the energy of lightning would be able to store this energy in a short time. Various ideas have been tried, but the ever-changing power of the lightning makes the practical on the ground -based benefits of flash energy. Excessive amounts of energy to destroy the memory and low amounts of energy can not be saved. In addition, lightning occur only sporadically, so that the energy would have to be collected and stored long-term. In addition, you would have the extremely high voltages into storable, convert lower voltages.

In the summer of 2007 tested a company for renewable energy, the Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc. ( AEHI ), a method to use the energy of a lightning bolt. The design for the system was purchased by Steve LeRoy, an inventor from Illinois, who was allegedly able to bring a 60-watt light bulb for 20 minutes using an artificial lights flash. The method includes a tower, in order to capture the large amount of energy and to save a capacitor them. According to Donald Gillispie, CEO of AEHI, " we can not make it work ," but " with enough time and money, you could enlarge the model ... it's not black magic, it's just math and science and it could reality. "

According to Martin A. Uman, the co-director of the Research Laboratory for flashes at the University of Florida and a leading scientist in the field of lightning, a single lightning contains a very small energy and it would be dozens, with the comparable of AEHI, "lightning towers " needed to five 100-watt light bulbs for a year to bring to light. When he was interviewed by the " New York Times " on the issue, he said that the energy of a thunderstorm is comparable with a nuclear bomb, but to try to capture the energy from the ground, " hopeless " is.

Another major challenge is to predict when and where thunderstorms will occur. Even during a storm, it is very difficult to say exactly where the flash will take.

A relatively simple method is to directly use the atmospheric charge before it discharges in a flash. On a smaller scale, this has been done a few times, with the famous example of Benjamin Franklin and his kite. However one needs to gain reasonable amounts of energy very large constructions and it is relatively difficult to use the resulting high voltage with reasonable efficiency.