Hmmm… you’ll have to share your work.
In my experience, only lightning has the “oomph” needed to restore that spark of life in the higher orders.
Although, I’m certain that ultimately the limitless energy of NUCLEAR FUSION is the way to go.
The more important point is that theories have explanatory power, and good theories explain things better than bad theories, or previous theories.
Theories generate testable hypotheses. If a thing does not generate any testable hypotheses, it isn’t a theory, and is, perhaps, a cheese danish or a particularly dyspeptic goat.
So close! It’s actually one point twenty-one jiggawatts.
The quote is “gigawatts”. Yes, there are some who pronounce “giga” as “jigga”, though it’s not common any more.
And thanks to a misplaced decimal point, your “calculation” actually turns out to be closer than ecg’s (hint: A thousand times a million isn’t a trillion).
So close! It’s actually “what the hell’s a jiggawatt?”
It helps to have Leyden jars, though. Which might explain the Great Pyramids, maybe it’s just a really huge Leyden jar. Built to power that MASER[sup][capitalization required][/sup] in the new chamber they recently discovered. It’s going to shoot vortexes at all you guys who scoffed at the possibility.
I don’t think you understand. Its plausible - the most plausible.
Per the cited Wiki, the energy comparison equates to 38 gal. (US) of gasoline, not 12.
Nitpicking on metric to US conversion factors aside, it would be interesting to know how the (Wiki) contributor manages to convert a lightning strike of “5 billion joules over 10 microseconds is equal to 5×1014 (or 500 trillion) watts” of electrical energy into an equivalent “145 liters” of gasoline.
My Harbor Freight generator 
pales in comparison.
Just something to ponder, when dismissing offhand a question based upon a Wiki cite.
Well, it certainly gave me plause.
I long ago thought of the notion of taking advantage of the immense power that lightning provides by somehow storing this power in large capacitors. But I was told by my Electrical Engineer nephew that only a tiny fraction of lightning-strike power could be stored in even the best, cutting-edge technology capacitor capability we now have. Though I am a bit sketchy on the scientific details of exactly why this is so, I recall it has something to do with the fact that electricity stores poorly and is given to immense entropy when forced to be confined or stored in a static state. That is…in order for it to remain at anywhere near its original levels, it must be “dynamic”–that is, kept moving, as in a continually-fed circuit. Thus, given the unpredictability and often-times scarcity of lightning strikes in a given area…these hypothetical capacitors would almost certainly “bleed out” before they could be utilized or recharged.
You will recall that real capacitors are only now used in electronics—not really in macro-level electricity. That is, these capacitors are only good on a micro level. Dealing in mV and mA and not lighting-level amounts.
Hope this helps.
This is incorrect. Capacitor banks are utilized in many high voltage/amperage applications, such as power conditioning for motor drives and on an even larger scale, industrial power factor correction.
But are you sure those systems are capacitors and not transformers? I have never heard of a true capacitor outside of electronics. Maybe you could throw me a link or a source? Thanks!
I work on a daily basis on the above mentioned capacitor smoothed 480 volt motor drives in a facility that has a 9 megawatt load @ 11,100 primary volts with a 480 volt secondary that is power factor corrected by a large bank of capacitors and inductors (we call them reactors), so yes, I’m aware of the difference between a cap and a transformer (and a reactor).
I know it is considered inappropriate here on SDMB to reply to a query for a cite with GOOGLE IT… But do your own homework. I suggest “motor drive capacitor” and “power factor correction capacitors” as keywords. If you can’t find a suitable explanation, reply and I’ll guide you through it.
Rather large capacitors are used for both power factor correction and for motor starting/running.
A very simple inductor is just a coil of wire. A very simple capacitor is just two metal plates parallel to each other. These are both energy storage devices. In an inductor, if you run current through the wire, energy ends up being stored in a magnetic field. Remove the current, and the magnetic field collapses, and the energy ends up getting converted back into electrical current. A capacitor is somewhat similar in that if you apply a voltage to it, energy gets stored, but unlike in an inductor, it is instead stored in an electric field. Remove the voltage and the field collapses, releasing the energy back into the circuit.
If you have an AC sine wave, like in power systems, inductors and capacitors kinda work opposite of each other. During the part of the sine wave where the inductor is charging, the capacitor is discharging, and when the inductor is discharging, the capacitor is charging.
Residential power loads tend to be slightly inductive, due mostly to motors in things like appliances and vacuum cleaners. When the load is slightly inductive, the power generators have to put out more current to charge up the magnetic fields in those inductors, which ends up being wasted energy since it is dumped back into the system later on in the AC sine wave cycle. So, power systems are at their most efficient when you balance out the inductive loads with capacitors. If you balance it exactly right, then the capacitors will be charging up while the inductors are discharging and the inductors will be charging when the capacitors are discharging, and all of that reactive energy effectively ends up just bounding back and forth between the inductors and capacitors. The generators therefore only have to supply the “real” (resistive) power, which increases the overall efficiency of the power system by eliminating the reactive current load on the generators.
Some of the capacitors that power companies use are located on utility poles. Others are located at the distribution substation. These are not tiny electronic type capacitors. They are large capacitors, operating at distribution voltages (somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 volts, typically).
The fence in the front of this picture will give you an idea of the scale of these capacitors:
Here’s a pole-mounted capacitor bank:
This is a pole-mounted transformer, so you can see the difference:
Capacitor banks may operate at even higher voltages than that. Here is an image of a 35 kV capacitor bank:
http://www.hycapacitor.com/en/UploadFiles/2010226134431602.jpg
A few years ago, a bunch of folks were advertising power factor correction devices for your home, which they claimed would make your electricity more efficient and save you money. While the concept of power factor correction is certainly valid, these devices most definitely would not save you money. First of all, they were just capacitors, without any switching, so they could not possibly balance out the changing inductive loads in your house. Second, the power company already uses capacitors, so they don’t need yours. Third, the power company doesn’t charge you for reactive loading. They only charge for the real power used. Even if you did have some sort of functioning capacitor-switching power factor device, it would only eliminate stuff that the power company isn’t charging you for anyway. So no possible savings, at all.
If you are an industrial or commercial customer though, the power company does charge you for reactive power. And they charge you out the wazoo, too. If your power load is too inductive, and you are an industrial or commercial customer, it’s basically “bend over and squeal like a piggy” time as far as your bank account is concerned. This gives industrial and commercial customers a HUGE incentive to install their own power factor correction devices. These companies will buy their own power factor correction capacitor systems, so it’s not only utility companies that own huge capacitors like these.
Certain types of motors also need capacitors to get them to start and to keep them running. This is true of some types of small motors used in hand tools, all the way up to huge motors used for things like crushing coal in power plants.
This wikipedia article has a good explanation of motor run and motor start capacitors. It’s the same principle, whether it’s a small motor or a large motor:
As far as lightning-level voltages go, they don’t make capacitors that can handle that. Not yet, anyway.
When I was in college (back in the days of dinosaurs), they would take old electronics and would leave them in a room on the top floor of the engineering building for us EE students to tinker with and to use in our projects. I got a capacitor about that big in diameter and about twice as tall out of that junk pile. We had of course learned how capacitors store energy and how you can discharge them, so I charged that capacitor up and shorted it with a screwdriver just to see what would happen in the real world. It arc-welded the screwdriver to the capacitor terminals, and blew the tip off of the screwdriver while it was at it.
It gave me a healthy respect for larger capacitors.
Rather large capacitors are also used for coin-shrinking.
No, really. The idea is that if you move enough current through a coil, and with a high enough ramp rate, you can generate a large, transient magnetic field in the rim of the coin; that field and the field of the coil repel each other, resulting in the coin being crushed radially (and the coil violently exploding).
Capacitors are used in many situations where you need a huge amount of power in very short bursts. Defibrillators, pulsed lasers and other pulsed light sources (including camera flashes), spot welders, explosive detonators, etc. And homemade railguns. (Probably the non-homemade ones too.)