Searched the forums, didn’t find a related thread…
Spurred on by the recent lightning shows we got in Virginia:
Do people currently have a practical use for lightning? Can we develop one?
It does clear areas of forests of dead wood through setting fires.
Time travel.
The problem is, it’s a tremendous amount of energy occurring in a very short amount of time. We put a lot of effort into guarding against direct strikes because of the damage they can do. Complicating matters, you never know when or where one will strike. And even if you could capture and store the energy, it would only amount to 250-500 kwh or so. Barely enough to run a single home for a couple of weeks. That’s a pretty bad ROI.
And then there’s the uncertainty. Where do you erect your lightning catcher? It would be like creating some marvelous machine that converts tidal energy into electrical power, and then setting it up on a beach somewhere in the world in anticipation of a tsunami.
Thunderstorms rain fertilizer?
Lightning produces some fixed nitrogen. Last time I looked this up, the theoretical estimated quantity was still unknown. The very small corona-glows near the tips of all the fractal lightning leaders will add up to a fairly enormous volume, so the nitrogen oxides coming down as rain could possibly be significant compared to other sources of fixed nitrogen.
Rather than dealing with full-blown lightning strikes, just aim your ultraviolet spotlights at a nearby thunderstorm, then collect the watts intercepted by the conductive beam. A sort of virtual antenna tower. Use a bunch of these to halt lightning production? If you can siphon off the kilojoules fast enough, then the voltage will never get high enough to make a wasteful electric arc.
Or maybe you can pulse the beams to trigger lightning as desired. Force the cumulonimbi to play the theme from Super Mario Brothers.
set up a huge capacitor and battery bank in a lightning-prone area. sensors will warn of of an impending stroke. either launch a model rocket with a wire streaming out or a wired projectile shot from a strong crossbow or a gun. the bolt will connect with the projectile and part of the curent will be coursed into your capacitors.
Reanimate a corpse?
If you put a light bulb or a coconut in your mouth…
it turns out the voltage, amperage and even wattage from a single bolt is impressive but the kilowatt-hours you’ll get from that one bolt won’t even run your house for two weeks.
Thanks for the factual answers!
You can figure out where the storm is by receiving lightning radio emissions - at least, you could do so with multiple stations, not sure if you can do it easily with a single receiver. Since lightning generally accompanies heavy rain and high wind, you can thereby track heavy rain and high wind before it gets to you.
Lightning is always handy whenever you need to discover electricity using a kite string and a key.
“The problem isn’t that there’s too much lightning, it’s that it’s not properly distributed.” - Mark Twain
Or make a new one. It could be a novel form of execution. Strap the evil-doer up on a high roof with a lightning rod taped to his head.
I always figured you could use a strike to power one whopper of a single use/pulse CO2 laser. Those lasers arent particularly hard or expensive or complicated to build.
I guess you could aim it at your local bank vault or water tower for shits and grins.
Who is John Galt?
You may know this, but …
There’s an aircraft storm detection device based on just this approach. http://www.stormscope.net/ It’s smaller, lighter, & cheaper than radar & useful for small aircraft. They derive the lightning’s approximate range from comparing the intensity & density of detected strikes with statistical models of storms. Not perfect, but these are tools for storm avoidance, not storm penetration.
Here’s a manufacturer of terrestrial detectors http://www.boltek.com/ and here’s an interestin gsite showng the result of lots of those detectors being deployed & feeding a single database http://www.strikestarus.com/