Anyone want to run the maths on an afternoons lightning as renewable energy?
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
175 points (100.0% liked)
Today I Learned
18080 readers
764 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Uhh... roughly 30 strikes per minute, over 6 hours would be 10k lightning strikes, at 300 million volts and about a billion joules a pop... If you could convince the thunderstorm to only strike your collection device, and you could store it usefully, uhhh
It's like... 3000 megawatt hours. A little less than that. Which is pretty substantial. A city in Australia or about a million people would use about half that amount in a day.
Buuuuuuut: that assumes 100% conversation of energy in a lightning bolt to energy in the system, that's frankly not remotely possible. You'd be lucky to capture 10% usefully.
The issue is probably storage, you can't use up all that electricity right away and it's probably hard to store it nicely
Although I'm not an engineer, just taking a wild guess. Maybe the lightning can be redirected into something to do something else (heat water etc.).
I love the human tendency to anthropomorphize things. Hector seems chill.
All my homies are down with a little afternoon convection.
It's like Karl the Fog's fun cousin from Down Under!
No mention of any variability in recent times, so it must be incredibly stable conditions for climate change to have not affected its formation.