How many kilowatt-hours can a lightning collect in the sky?

Summer is here, and there will not be less torrential rain. It is even more necessary to have a thunderstorm and lightning. Then I suddenly thought of such a problem. How much electricity is a lightning in the sky ...

At this point, the editor who likes "crazy thinking" suddenly thought of a problem: the lightning in the sky, which looks like it has a lot of energy, directly "caught" it, and the power plant does not need to be built, : Hate you!) Isn't it beautiful? A search on the Internet, it seems that someone really did this!

People see power generation as beneficial to hydropower and wind power, but is it possible to use lightning to generate electricity? From the perspective of charge, then pure, average energy per lightning only 50 GJ, assuming losses during transmission and storage to zero, it is only phase when the energy of less than 1400 kwh.

There are about 1.4 billion lightning strikes a year in the world, of which only about 25% are ground lightning, and most of them are intra-cloud or inter-cloud lightning, which cannot be used. In addition, assuming that all lightning can be used 100%, and there is no loss during capture, transmission and storage, the energy collected in one year is 490 billion kilowatt hours.

In 2009, about 20 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity was used worldwide, more than 40 times the energy contained in all available ground lightning. That said, all the lightning we can capture is only available for 9 days worldwide.

But there are more reasons. If you want to see how much it would cost to capture these lightning bolts: In order to capture every ground lightning bolt, we have to build a lot of high towers around the globe (think of the Eiffel Tower in Paris). All told earth's surface area of 200 million square miles per square mile is necessary to build such a tower. Devices that capture lightning energy must be able to cope with extreme transient currents. To do this, it is necessary to use very thick conductive rods as well as ultra-heavy circuits and super capacitors.

Although we have not developed this kind of electrical energy storage technology, assuming we can do it, and assuming that the energy system is 100% efficient (most electrical energy systems are only less than 70% to 80% efficient in the best state), Then we can imagine each tower and electricity

The cost of the container is about ￡ 350,000. As a result, the cost of bare-ground equipment (regardless of the additional cost of the marine version) is as high as ￡ 67 trillion. Not to mention installation costs, routine maintenance, and the cost of high-voltage transmission line networks connecting all high towers.

In comparison, one hour of sunlight can generate electricity for our year. We only need to use the roof to accumulate the energy we need and then store it with a UPS uninterruptible power supply . So, I can't help asking: "Why don't we cover all the roofs with solar panels?"