Use of lightning energy

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Icon tools.svg
This article was registered in the quality assurance of the physics editorial team . If you are familiar with the topic, you are welcome to participate in the review and possible improvement of the article. The exchange of views about this is currently not taking place on the article discussion page , but on the quality assurance side of physics.

The use of lightning energy is understood to mean attempts to make the energy contained in lightning technically usable. This has been attempted since the late 1980s. Electrical energy of approx. 280 kWh is discharged in a single flash  . This corresponds to about 1  GJ or the energy of about 31 liters of gasoline. However, less than a tenth arrives on the ground, and only sporadically in space and time. It has been proposed to use the energy of lightning to produce hydrogen from water, to use the water quickly heated by the lightning to generate electricity, or to capture a safe fraction of the energy using inductors placed nearby .

A technology that is able to use the energy of lightning should be able to store this energy in a short time. Various ideas have already been tried, but the ever-changing intensity of the lightning strikes makes the use of lightning energy on the ground impractical. Too high amounts of energy destroy the storage and insufficient amounts of energy cannot be stored. In addition, lightning only occurs sporadically, so that the energy would have to be collected and stored for a longer period of time. In addition, the extremely high voltages would have to be converted into storable, lower ones.

In the summer of 2007, a renewable energy company , Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc. (AEHI) tested a method to harness the energy of lightning. She bought the design for the system from Steve LeRoy, an inventor from Illinois , who claimed that a 60-watt lightbulb had been lit for 20 minutes with a small artificial flash . The method involves a tower to capture the large amount of energy and a very large capacitor to store it. According to Donald Gillispie, CEO of AEHI, “we couldn't get it to work (... but) with enough time and money you could probably enlarge the model (...) it's not black magic, it's just math and science and it could become a reality ”.

According to Martin A. Uman , co-director of the research laboratory for lightning at the University of Florida and a leading scientist in lightning, little energy reaches the ground and dozens of “lightning towers” ​​comparable to those of AEHI would be needed light up five 100 watt lightbulbs for a year. When asked by the New York Times on the subject, he said that the amount of energy in a thunderstorm is comparable to that of an atomic bomb explosion, but at the same time the attempt to capture the energy from the surface of the earth is "hopeless". Another major challenge is predicting when and where the thunderstorms will occur; and even during a storm it is very difficult to predict exactly where lightning will strike.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dr.-Ing. Thomas Gobmaier: Use of storm energy . Research Center for Energy Industry e. V .. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  2. ↑ Thunderstorms and lightning as a source of energy. Accessed January 21, 2020 .
  3. ^ "The Electrification of Thunderstorms," ​​Earle R. Williams, Scientific American, November 1988, pp. 88-99
  4. ↑ Dr. Knowledge: Why can't we capture lightning and convert it into usable electricity? . In: The Boston Globe , October 29, 2007. Retrieved August 29, 2009.  ( Page no longer available , search web archives ) @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.boston.com
  5. ^ Helman, DS: Catching lightning for alternative energy . In: Renewable Energy . 36, 2011, pp. 1311-1314. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  6. ↑ a b John Glassie: Lightning Farms . In: The New York Times , December 9, 2007. Retrieved July 24, 2020. 
  7. ↑ Uman Receives 2001 Fleming Medal ( Memento from July 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). www.agu.org