Lightning forms from the build up of electrons or negative charges in the cloud or the ground and needs to get rid of atoms. Since protons and electrons attract, it sends atoms down to the ground creating heat and light. Since clouds are water vapour, can we actually use water vapour to create charges , thereby creating lightning ? If so , can we actually use that lightning as a way to power our need for energy ? Will it be possible that someday , we can just use water vapour to create lightning as a form of usable energy ?
It’s been possible to generate lightning for years; they just shoot a small rocket trailing a wire into a storm to provide a conductive path and boom. There’s also the idea of using lasers for the same purpose (they create an ionized path that electrical currents can follow).
The problem is that lightning is sporadic; it is impressive because it is a lot of energy when concentrated in a single lightning flash, but that doesn’t mean you can power a town with it. And storms aren’t that common. And when there’s no storm, there’s not much charge; which is why they can’t shoot that rocket into just any random cloud and get lightning.
lightning is concentrated energy but not much in total to harvest.
the charge doesn’t just result from water but what the water has been exposed to, a wild ride.
static discharge is created by people and has been done with water.
Lightning only contains a relatively small amount of usable energy. Wikipedia claims "According to Northeastern University physicists Stephen Reucroft and John Swain, a lightning bolt carries a few million joules of energy, enough to power a 100-watt bulb for 5.5 hours. " However, their citation is to a subscription-only site and can’t be verified.
Is it possible to create lightning? Yes. Now, if you mean, harvest lightning, that’s different. 
Well , yeah , I’m talking about harvesting the energy from lightning. Maybe it’s not much to harvest , but it will be quite useful when all those fossil fuels and whatever not have ran out , right ? And I mean creating lightning by our own means , not just creating a conductive path for lightning from a storm to follow , but rather , creating the storm itself.
550 Watt*hours per bolt is not useful. It would be a whole lot less effort and cost to install solar PV.
energy from lightning doesn’t come from no where. ultimately its source is solar energy. solar energy can be more efficiently be collected thermally, direct conversion, biofuels and wind.
But a thunderstorm would contain a lot more energy. From Wikipedia , According to Dr. Martin A. Uman, he stated that the energy in a thunderstorm is comparable to that of an atomic bomb, but trying to harvest the energy of lightning from the ground is “hopeless”.
Would he mean hopeless as impossible ? Or does he state it as something hard to achieve ?
I’m wondering about generating lightning , generate lightning , enough lightning to be harvested as a source of energy . If a single bolt is not useful , then can’t we create more of it ? If we’re talking about cost , would it definitely cost more than solar PV ?
Enter N. Tesla, on rubber sole platform-shoes, stage right!
From descriptions of effects at his 1899 Colorado Springs experiments, it’s remotely possible that Tesla stumbled upon a way to synchronize either the RF output of global lightning, or the RF output of ionosphere plasma. Normally the pulses from step-leaders are random and not additive (if within the nearfield zone, for every pulse at 0deg phase lag, there is some other pulse nearby at 180deg phase.) An externally applied “clock” wave of sufficiently high e-field intensity might cause syncronized lightning emissions and an RF output vaguely akin to stimulated emission amplification.
The RF effects reported in Colorado aren’t those of an outdoor Tesla coil. They more resemble those seen inside a microwave oven cavity. So if the local landscape was covered with e-fields near the breakdown voltage for air, one would expect to see many interesting sights. Old fashioned high-vacuum incandescent bulbs very well could light up from cold-cathode multipactor effect while held in the hands. Horses wouldn’t like metal nails in their hooves touching the dirt. Wire fences might become lethally dangerous. Along similar lines, one of the HAARP patent documents does mention an observation where the VLF transmissions in certain situations are returned with several orders of magnitude higher wattage than normal, and speculates that a dangerous “runaway” global RF effect might be possible.
But if any of this was real …where was Tesla hiding his ten miles tall 10KHz radio tower? There was a slight problem of impedance mismatch. And why don’t the big Hollywood Tesla coils provoke similar effects during outdoor stadium shows? And if distant thunderstorms are able to become oscillating RF amplifiers, why aren’t RF ionospheric researchers at NASA frequently detecting high-wattage VLF wavetrains?
That seems way low by a couple orders of magnitude, but nonetheless, it isn’t enough energy to be useful on large scales, even if it could somehow be completely recovered. Most of the electrical energy in the atmosphere is stored much higher, with the bulk of charged atmosphere being in the rarified thermosphere where free electrons and charged particles can exist without being constantly recombined. This could potentially be a source for orbiting satellites and space stations, but is far too high to be of use for terrestrial applications.
As others have pointed out, radiant solar and solar-derived (wind and wave) energy is both far more abundant and accessible than atmospheric electricity. The biggest problems with transitioning from fossil energy sources to solar-based energy, other than the much larger energy generation footprint, is having a suitable means to store and deliver it. Fossil fuels are highly useful because they come in a compact, non-perishable, and bulk manipulation form, especially liquid petroleum; all you have to do is dig or pump them up, and then move them to wherever they are needed with little or no decay of energy quantity. Electrical energy, generated by photovoltaic cells or periodic momentum transfer, doesn’t store at all (without conversion to some other medium) and suffers significant energy losses over transmission distance. (To be fair, it must be pointed out that chemical energy suffers unavoidable and significant thermodynamic losses during conversion, while electrical energy can be used directly with only slight losses, so there is a balance.)
It should be noted that both the electrical and kinetic energy in the atmosphere serve a significant role in the Earth’s hydrodynamic processes, and tapping those significantly could have some very serious unanticipated impacts. While absorbing solar energy at ground level has little environmental impact (other than taking up the local footprint), and wind power takes only a tiny fraction of total kinetic energy (enough only to modestly disturb local microclimes), sucking energy directly from the atmosphere in substantial quantities will retard normal atmospheric activity. So even if we could do this, it very probably would not be a smart thing to do.
Stranger
The energy does not come from the water vapor, it comes from the kinetic energy imparted to the water vapor through the convection currents inside huge cloud cells, which in turn are created by the thermals rising from land warmed by the Sun. To make artificial lightning with artificial clouds would require an artificial sun, which would require more energy input to the system than you could ever hope to get out of the system. Not only is it impractical, if we had an artificial sun, we wouldn’t need to harvest the energy from artificial lightning.
So, no 1.21 gigawatts?
No thanks, I’m trying to quit.
Una, who has stood next to a 1.4 GW generator…too many times.
I don’t know how many watts a lightning bolt really is, but the lightbulb comparison does not rule out 1.21 gigawatts. 1.21 gigawatts is just a measure of power, not of energy. 1.21 gigawatts for the correct unit of time (a tiny fraction of a second) would be the same as 100 watts for 5.5 hours.
If you come up with the Flux Capacitor, I’ll find a way to get you the 1.21GW. I have someone’s grandfather to kill.