In , a company called Alternative Energy Holdings tried to make it happen, with a design that involved a tower, grounding wires and a capacitor. Quite frankly, we just couldn't make it work Given enough time and money, you could probably scale this thing up. It's not black magic; it's truly math and science, and it could happen. The logistical problems involved in making it work are significant.
First of all, there's the basic fact that thunder storms are sporadic and lighting strikes random; considering that energy demands are steady, dependable energy sources are preferable. Second, it's not so easy to capture energy delivered in one enormous blast in a split second.
Tall metallic rods extending high above the ground would do the trick, drawing any electrical charges in the atmosphere and directing them into a facility.
But robust and dependable safety mechanisms would also need to be built to immediately contain the huge burst of energy and prevent the entire facility from being blown to bits.
And because you never know if an upcoming lightning strike is going to carry a positive or negative charge, capacitors and rectifiers would also be necessary to equalize the currents of incoming strikes. In addition, determining the most practical locations for capture facilities would present a huge host of problems. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, lightning strikes somewhere on the earth approximately 44 times every second, but most of those strikes occur in the tropics and remote mountain regions.
Constructing a state-of-the-art energy conversion and storage facility in such conditions would be enormously difficult. So, now you need a few strikes per household per month, and in the end, even if we could find a way to capture, store, and use the energy, it would power only about 0. All Rights Reserved. Menu About Contacts Directions. Lightning strikes over a year are around 1.
That leaves only million lightning strikes that could possibly be harnessed. In , the world used around 20,,,,kWh — over 40 times the electrical energy that all the hypothetically harness-able land strikes contain. So, basically, all the lightning we can capture will give the world enough electricity for only nine days!
To capture each and every lightning strike land strikes only we would most likely have to put extremely tall towers think the Eiffel Tower around a mile apart in a grid formation covering the entire globe. That is one tower for each of the almost ,,sq m of the Earth's surface.
0コメント