Cymek asked a question about lightning and storing it, the initial response was there is no technology to do it atm and its not economically viable atm.

While I’m doing nothing I will have a think, ok, I did some looking.

How many farads is 3 billion volts at 100,000 Amps.? That’s the kind of supercapacitors which will be needed. Could such a beast be made, what about lots of smaller ones?

ok, I think the future might hold promise, but its a big maybe, no idea on time lines.

The pathway there might be something like this…

1 Diverting the energy (This can now be done over short distances) See Sibeens article from the age
https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/scientists-use-high-power-laser-to-divert-lightning-strikes-20230117-p5cd0n.html

Plasma tech is in its infancy, so lots of new stuff could be discovered.

2 An energy collection and distribution system (this is the current problem) I’m unaware of anything that can do this with such high energies involved.

One problem there is heat loss, consider the Vatican which gets hit a lot, thick copper pipes glow red from the heat of the lightning going to ground.

So maybe some kind of cooled superconductors which take the initial hit of the the plasma then some way of distributing and then storing large amounts of energy, maybe.

Well it will have to be distributed over a large bank of batteries which may or may not involve supercapacitors, no idea there, but the trick here is not one battery but many.

3 A large bank of super capacitors as a temporary storing of large amounts of energy. Today’s supercapacitors can now hold 10,000, 30,000 Farads, no idea of state of art.

from
https://www.quora.com/What-size-of-capacitors-would-you-use-to-collect-a-lighting-strike

What size of capacitors would you use to collect a lighting strike?

The fact that lightning will jump 1000 meters says the voltage is 3 billion volts. A typical discharge could have 100,000 Amps. It lasts only a few milliseconds.

IF you were to capture the lightning energy you will need a capacitor with a rating of 3 billion volts and a low ESR and low inductance.

Remember that the wattage dissipated will be I^2 R so if you have a 1 ohm of ESR then the wattage it needs to withstand due to ESR resistive loss will be like 10^10 watts in just a few milliseconds! Voltage loss will be 100,000 volts. and net energy loss in the stored capacitor around 6%.. You need to make ESR as small as possible.

Capacitance : I = C dv/dt. If we assume I = 100,000, dV = 3,000,000,000 and dt = 11 ms then C=3.7e-6 or around 3.7 uF but rated 3 billion volts.

It will also have to have very low inductance; the voltage loss is L di/dt and as we know di/dt is huge. assuming 100,000 Amps and 1 millisecond we lose 1×10^8 volts per henry. To keep energy losses under 10% the voltage loss needs to be less than 5% (60,000,000 V) so L needs to be less than .6 Henries.

So there are several rather demanding specifications, I imagine the daunting one is the 3 billion volt rating; that by the way only applies to lightning jumping 1 km to earth; if it jumps more then you will need proportionally more voltage rating.

see more at https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-largest-capacitor-ever-made-and-what-was-its-purpose

4 A battery for long term storage (we have various batteries that can do this)

5 A suitable site, yes there are one or 2 places, but not here in Australia.

There’s only a few places in the world that receive a lot of lightning strikes, It might be viable in Venezuela and one or two other places that receive lots of strikes.

According to NASA Earth Observatory: “With an average flash rate of 389 per day, Lake Maracaibo in northern Venezuela (shown above) has the highest flash extent density in the world.15 June 2022

ok that place looks like a good place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning

The map on the right shows that lightning is not distributed evenly around the planet. About 70% of lightning occurs on land in the Tropics, where the majority of thunderstorms occur. The North and South Poles and the areas over the oceans have the fewest lightning strikes. The place where lightning occurs most often is above the Catatumbo river, which feeds Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, where the so-called Catatumbo lightning flashes several times per minute, with lightning happening up to 300 nights a year. This gives Lake Maracaibo the highest number of lightning strikes per square kilometer in the world, at 250. The region with the second-most is the village Kifuka, in the mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the elevation is around 1,700 metres (5,600 ft), receives 232 lightning strikes per square kilometer (409 per sq mi) a year.

Its looking very viable there at 389 strikes a day.

Global map of lightning frequency—strikes/km2/yr. The high lightning areas are on land located in the tropics. Areas with almost no lightning are the Arctic and Antarctic, closely followed by the oceans which have only 0.1 to 1 strikes/km2/yr.

So quite a few problems to overcome.

Found a quote on one of the tech sites

“Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.”

- Isaac Asimov

Lake Maracaibo with 389 lightning flashes per day !!!

Must be a noisy place eh? Bam, then another…

Wonder what the average decibel levels would be across the whole day?

I guess you could further look at the lightning strikes to see where best you could put a lightning receiver station, that if its possible.

With a one kilometre laser reach I wonder how many of those 389 strikes could be captured.
With so many strikes maybe 2 or 3 – 1km lasers?

You’ve heard of cloud seeding to make rain.

Could you seed clouds to make lighting?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Cymek asked a question about lightning and storing it, the initial response was there is no technology to do it atm and its not economically viable atm.

While I’m doing nothing I will have a think, ok, I did some looking.

How many farads is 3 billion volts at 100,000 Amps.? That’s the kind of supercapacitors which will be needed. Could such a beast be made, what about lots of smaller ones?

I think you’re missing a unit in the above, Tau.

Capacitance © equals charge (Q) divided by volts (V).

Charge (Q) is in coulombs which is the number of charge carriers when one amp flows through a cross section in one second.

sibeen said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Cymek asked a question about lightning and storing it, the initial response was there is no technology to do it atm and its not economically viable atm.

While I’m doing nothing I will have a think, ok, I did some looking.

How many farads is 3 billion volts at 100,000 Amps.? That’s the kind of supercapacitors which will be needed. Could such a beast be made, what about lots of smaller ones?

I think you’re missing a unit in the above, Tau.

Capacitance © equals charge (Q) divided by volts (V).

Charge (Q) is in coulombs which is the number of charge carriers when one amp flows through a cross section in one second.

I’m a lazy systems analyst not a electricity person. I’m always missing something when it comes to electricity, its nice stuff, cant see it, dangerous to touch, it turns things on and off, comes in small amounts and large amounts, has all these mathematical parameters which I’m always confused with and that’s about all I know of it.

sibeen said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Cymek asked a question about lightning and storing it, the initial response was there is no technology to do it atm and its not economically viable atm.

While I’m doing nothing I will have a think, ok, I did some looking.

How many farads is 3 billion volts at 100,000 Amps.? That’s the kind of supercapacitors which will be needed. Could such a beast be made, what about lots of smaller ones?

I think you’re missing a unit in the above, Tau.

Capacitance © equals charge (Q) divided by volts (V).

Charge (Q) is in coulombs which is the number of charge carriers when one amp flows through a cross section in one second.

Actually, you (?) do the calculation further down.

sibeen said:

sibeen said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Cymek asked a question about lightning and storing it, the initial response was there is no technology to do it atm and its not economically viable atm.

While I’m doing nothing I will have a think, ok, I did some looking.

How many farads is 3 billion volts at 100,000 Amps.? That’s the kind of supercapacitors which will be needed. Could such a beast be made, what about lots of smaller ones?

I think you’re missing a unit in the above, Tau.

Capacitance © equals charge (Q) divided by volts (V).

Charge (Q) is in coulombs which is the number of charge carriers when one amp flows through a cross section in one second.

Actually, you (?) do the calculation further down.

Not me, some other smart person, smarter than me.

I think he might be an electrical engineer.

Tau.Neutrino said:

sibeen said:

sibeen said:

I think you’re missing a unit in the above, Tau.

Capacitance © equals charge (Q) divided by volts (V).

Charge (Q) is in coulombs which is the number of charge carriers when one amp flows through a cross section in one second.

Actually, you (?) do the calculation further down.

Not me, some other smart person, smarter than me.

I think he might be an electrical engineer.

They’re generally dumb cunts.

I finks the troubles with harnessing lightning is the speed of the pulses, the rise time of the pulses, and i’m not sure there is slow lightning that way

it doesn’t have many characteristics of a reliable power source really, even if you hypothetically could keep it in a box, that it emanated reliably from a box, it’d still be a menace, variable extreme high voltage, unpredictable pulses, doesn’t sound friendly

sibeen said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

sibeen said:

Actually, you (?) do the calculation further down.

Not me, some other smart person, smarter than me.

I think he might be an electrical engineer.

They’re generally dumb cunts.

OK, if you’ve captured all that, without loss, you’ve got 16 and a half trillion joules, or around four and a half Gigawatt hours.

Still won’t be worth all the effort :)

mollwollfumble said:

You’ve heard of cloud seeding to make rain.

Could you seed clouds to make lighting?

Its more Warm air Meets Cold air.

from
https://www.atlasobscura.com/videos/see-venezuela-s-everlasting-lightning-storm

Is there a place on Earth where lightning never stops?

Known as Relámpago del Catatumbo, the storm is located where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo. Warm air from the Caribbean meets the cold air from the mountains, creating the perfect conditions for lightning. This everlasting lightning storm may be the world’s largest generator of ozone.

sibeen said:

sibeen said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Not me, some other smart person, smarter than me.

I think he might be an electrical engineer.

They’re generally dumb cunts.

OK, if you’ve captured all that, without loss, you’ve got 16 and a half trillion joules, or around four and a half Gigawatt hours.

Still won’t be worth all the effort :)

Yep, ok, but I find its interesting.

I dont know enough about it.

Other things to consider would be:

Future projections of lightning activity increasing due to climate change, more temperature increases equals more lightning.

The energy required to generate the one kilometre laser to focus the lightning to the collector.

The energy required for super cooling the superconductors for the collector and distribution system.

The cost of developing a super cooled lightning collector and distribution system using superconductors.

The cost of banks of supercapacitors that can take all that energy in one go.

The cost of long term batteries.

I have wonder many times if a suitably powerful laser could ionise the air enough between the cloud and ground station to control where the next lightning bolt is going to go.

Artificial intelligence could look at all aspects of moving lightning storms using ground and satellite information to make rapid predictions.

Maybe some kind of laser could be used as a probe to measure the level of energy build up.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Maybe some kind of laser could be used as a probe to measure the level of energy build up.

I can’t find a good video on one, but some light aircraft have an instrument called a Stormscope. It detects the lightning strikes and displays their bearing and approximate distance to the aircraft in flight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O73wlmtUlT8

Very, very frightening

With current technology the largest commercial capacitors are round 30,000 Farads

So to reach 3 billion Farads you would need a large bank of around one hundred thousand capacitors.

Military capacitors are much larger than 30,000 farads so it would be interesting to learn about the largest military capacitor around the size of a truck.

Tau, the Farads required was small. Very small, very fucking small.

Read the thread.

Very small.

ok I got my farads mixed up with volts.

Tau.Neutrino said:

ok I got my farads mixed up with volts.

3.7 uF but rated at 3 billion volts.

Look I don’t know much but it does seem to me that you’re going to be better off trying to utilise the electrostatic imbalance without waiting for a lightning strike.

General atomic has high voltage capacitors

Very High Voltage Capacitors 100 kV – 2 MV 100 pF – 4 µF Capacitance values ranging from microfarads at 100 kV to nanofarads at 1 MV.

dv said:

Look I don’t know much but it does seem to me that you’re going to be better off trying to utilise the electrostatic imbalance without waiting for a lightning strike.

This would be better than waiting around for the next strike.

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

Look I don’t know much but it does seem to me that you’re going to be better off trying to utilise the electrostatic imbalance without waiting for a lightning strike.

This would be better than waiting around for the next strike.

But honestly I’m very pessimistic about a cost effective way of harnessing these natural electrostatic forces will ever be built.

dv said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

Look I don’t know much but it does seem to me that you’re going to be better off trying to utilise the electrostatic imbalance without waiting for a lightning strike.

This would be better than waiting around for the next strike.

But honestly I’m very pessimistic about a cost effective way of harnessing these natural electrostatic forces will ever be built.

Lots of problems to overcome

Designing a cost effective way of supercooling the superconductors to collect the lighting and distribute it to the supercapacitors.

Designing a cost effective bank of supercapacitors.

And enough lightning to be viable.

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

This would be better than waiting around for the next strike.

But honestly I’m very pessimistic about a cost effective way of harnessing these natural electrostatic forces will ever be built.

Lots of problems to overcome

Designing a cost effective way of supercooling the superconductors to collect the lighting and distribute it to the supercapacitors.

Designing a cost effective bank of supercapacitors.

And enough lightning to be viable.

Maybe in 50 years.

dv said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

Look I don’t know much but it does seem to me that you’re going to be better off trying to utilise the electrostatic imbalance without waiting for a lightning strike.

This would be better than waiting around for the next strike.

But honestly I’m very pessimistic about a cost effective way of harnessing these natural electrostatic forces will ever be built.

If only someone had pointed that out early in the thread.

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

This would be better than waiting around for the next strike.

But honestly I’m very pessimistic about a cost effective way of harnessing these natural electrostatic forces will ever be built.

Lots of problems to overcome

Designing a cost effective way of supercooling the superconductors to collect the lighting and distribute it to the supercapacitors.

Designing a cost effective bank of supercapacitors.

And enough lightning to be viable.

I have an idea, about this ‘theoretical’ proposition, that you will need more than XC, I think also it would require some very impressive XL, I mean charging big capacitors very fast, fast as lightning sounds like a good idea, naively indulged

nearest thing you have to a capacitor than can do that is the clouds it comes from, or clouds and earth being analogous to capacitor plates, or between cloud masses, and air between being the extra dialectic insulation to let the charge build up, to those sort of voltages, not ideal voltages for a reliable power supply I might have mentioned previous

transition said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

But honestly I’m very pessimistic about a cost effective way of harnessing these natural electrostatic forces will ever be built.

Lots of problems to overcome

Designing a cost effective way of supercooling the superconductors to collect the lighting and distribute it to the supercapacitors.

Designing a cost effective bank of supercapacitors.

And enough lightning to be viable.

I have an idea, about this ‘theoretical’ proposition, that you will need more than XC, I think also it would require some very impressive XL, I mean charging big capacitors very fast, fast as lightning sounds like a good idea, naively indulged

nearest thing you have to a capacitor than can do that is the clouds it comes from, or clouds and earth being analogous to capacitor plates, or between cloud masses, and air between being the extra dialectic insulation to let the charge build up, to those sort of voltages, not ideal voltages for a reliable power supply I might have mentioned previous

really you need start by experimenting with Van der Graaf generator, practice steering the charge into the capacitor the right way, some impressive high voltage diode stacks for that maybe, with voltage equalization resistors across them, with it in mind when you upscale or upsize for lightning it will need accommodate less common nasty positive lightning strikes, which might be 100-1000 X the highest powerline voltages, latter could be 1100KV i’m not sure, so 10-100X that

i’m not actually sure about lightning voltages, whatever

so really you need a very big rectifier, high speed diodes, for ridiculously high voltages, with protections across the diodes, both resistors for equalization and spark gap and MOV perhaps

then you’ve got this trouble of requiring big enough capacitors with ridiculous specifications, and you’ve got to get the pulsed charge into them, which has a risetime up there at speeds probably in the lower radio frequency bands

General Atomic sell high voltage capacitors

(3 billion volts) / (100 000 volts) = thirty thousand

A bank of thirty thousand capacitors each at 100 000 volts

or

1 Mega Volt means 10⁶V

(3 billion volts) / (1000000 volts) = three thousand

or a bank of three thousand 1MV capacitors

(3 billion volts) / (2000000 volts) = one thousand five hundred

or a bank of one thousand five hundred 2MV capacitors

100 pF – 4 µF Capacitance values ranging from microfarads at 100 kV to nanofarads at 1 MV.

This search leads to some interesting questions.

Can lightning be captured by a superconductor.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=can+lightning+be+captured+by+a+superconductor

transition said:

transition said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Lots of problems to overcome

Designing a cost effective way of supercooling the superconductors to collect the lighting and distribute it to the supercapacitors.

Designing a cost effective bank of supercapacitors.

And enough lightning to be viable.

I have an idea, about this ‘theoretical’ proposition, that you will need more than XC, I think also it would require some very impressive XL, I mean charging big capacitors very fast, fast as lightning sounds like a good idea, naively indulged

nearest thing you have to a capacitor than can do that is the clouds it comes from, or clouds and earth being analogous to capacitor plates, or between cloud masses, and air between being the extra dialectic insulation to let the charge build up, to those sort of voltages, not ideal voltages for a reliable power supply I might have mentioned previous

really you need start by experimenting with Van der Graaf generator, practice steering the charge into the capacitor the right way, some impressive high voltage diode stacks for that maybe, with voltage equalization resistors across them, with it in mind when you upscale or upsize for lightning it will need accommodate less common nasty positive lightning strikes, which might be 100-1000 X the highest powerline voltages, latter could be 1100KV i’m not sure, so 10-100X that

i’m not actually sure about lightning voltages, whatever

so really you need a very big rectifier, high speed diodes, for ridiculously high voltages, with protections across the diodes, both resistors for equalization and spark gap and MOV perhaps

then you’ve got this trouble of requiring big enough capacitors with ridiculous specifications, and you’ve got to get the pulsed charge into them, which has a risetime up there at speeds probably in the lower radio frequency bands

>which might be 100-1000 X the highest powerline voltages, latter could be 1100KV i’m not sure, so 10-100X that

left off couple zeros there second time, but as was writ first time

i’m being thorough, though quite possibly still way off, who knows, i’m not a lightning capture expert, generally avoid it enthusiastically