Seems to my ignorant eyes that we could always somehow split the power received into more manageable units, even if it has to be splitted a million times, 🤷♂️.
I think the difficult part with harnessing lighting is the consistency of it. We would need to build in places where thunderstorms are common, which will only be true for particular seasons. The other limitation is the battery technology that we currently have. It could be a better resource if we could find a way to store electricity in a non-degrading system. I think the new solid state batteries are supposed to be that way, but I don’t know enough about them or this topic to really say. Alternatively, we can just pump people full of radiation until one of them becomes a weather controlling mutant so we can have infinite thunder storms.
It would also be interesting if we had a way to greatly increase the chance of lightning in a small area, but by that point, we’re probably still not justifying the cost of that R&D.
It’s a nice idea, but it’s too unreliable. And infrequent.
Wondered the same, learned its too unreliable where it hits and not consistant enough. Thats also a big issue with renewable energy now, we dont have a proper way to store overloads and have to acually waste it currently.
Voltage rises with altitude, it’s theoretically possible to raise one end of a well insulated wire very high into the sky and jam the other end into the Earth to draw current from the sky.
This isn’t exactly harnessing lighting, more like harvesting the energy in lightning before it strikes.
…shouldn’t you be in 1985?
There’s a retired astronaut whose entire post-NASA career has been devoted to developing a plasma propulsion engine. Which is kind of (though not exactly) what you’re thinking of.
