Harvesting lightning energy

A technology capable of harvesting lightning energy would need to be able to rapidly capture the high power involved in a lightning bolt. Additionally, lightning is sporadic, and therefore energy would have to be collected and stored; it is difficult to convert high-voltage electrical power to the lower-voltage power that can be stored. "a single lightning strike, while fast and bright, contains very little energy by the time it gets down to earth, and dozens of lightning towers like those used in the system tested by AEHI would be needed to operate five 100-watt light bulbs for the course of a year". When interviewed by The New York Times, he stated that "the energy in a thunderstorm is comparable to that of an atomic bomb, but trying to harvest the energy of lightning from the ground is hopeless". Another major challenge when attempting to harvest energy from lightning is the impossibility of predicting when and where thunderstorms will occur. Even during a storm, it is very difficult to tell where exactly lightning will strike. == Directed plasma channels ==

To facilitate the harvesting of lightning, a laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC) could theoretically be used to influence lightning to strike in a predictable location. A high power laser could be used to form an ionized column of gas, which would act as an atmospheric conduit for electrical discharges of lightning, which would direct the lightning to a ground station for harvesting. Teramobile, an international project initiated jointly by a French-German collaboration of CNRS (France) and DFG (Germany), has managed to trigger electric activity in thunderclouds by ultrashort lasers. A large peak pulse power was used, 5 terawatts, although the average power was only 2.7 W, as a result of the extremely short (150 femtosecond) pulse length. For the moment, the application of laser-channeled lightning is to use energy to divert the lightning and prevent damage instead of harvesting the lightning energy. ==See also==