4 ms·

This [1] article claims that the electricity from 115 strikes could power the entire US grid for a year, but it's surely napkin math. Awesome tech, though! [1]

• xnx 1y ago
  That article seems very very wrong. I think they missed the difference between GW and GWh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs28lEq9smw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs28lEq9smw
  • npunt 1y ago
    Hah quite the oversight! To put a spin on an old saying, a little math is a dangerous thing.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• janalsncm 1y ago
  Apparently a single lightning strike contains the equivalent of about 40 gallons of gasoline. It’s very powerful but not that significant on the scale of a whole city. In fact a quick back of the napkin math suggests it would only power a city of a million people for half a second. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy
  • hinkley 1y ago
    I wonder what the average property damage is per strike. And if forcing lightning reduces or changes storm power. Maybe for preventative reasons you put them outside of towns and such.
    • barbazoo 1y ago
      Maybe to avoid wildfires caused by lightning strikes, happens a lot up here in BC.
  • rybosome 1y ago
    This comment made me wonder about the idea of harvesting lightning as a power source. Obviously it’s incredibly challenging, but I wondered if we had magic sci-fi technology that allowed it, how useful would it be? Back of the napkin math suggests that even with theoretically perfect prediction, capture, storage and distribution you’d still get at best ~1% of the US’ energy through lightning capture.
    • barbazoo 1y ago
      We don't even universally accept that sun and wind could be enough to power everything we ever want to do. Not sure how well lightning harvesting will be received.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > harvesting lightning as a power source Recontextualise it as harvesting electrostatic potential from the atmosphere and you see that potential is driven by the Sun.
• aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
• colechristensen 1y ago
  that article does not make that claim
  • nirse 1y ago
    I think it does: Right at the bottom under Frequently Asked Questions: How much lightning would we need to capture to power the entire U.S. electricity grid? Merely capturing the energy from 115 lightning strikes would supply all of the U.S.'s annual electricity needs.
    • jerf 1y ago
      Just for fun: 2023 US electrical power generation was 4,178 terawatt-hours [1], or 1.5e19 joules [2]. Divided by 115 that would be approx. 1.3e17 joules. The Hiroshima bomb was 6e13 joules [3]. Which would leave each of those lightning strikes that can supply the US annual electricity needs as outputting approximately 2200 Hiroshima bomb's worth of energy. I think we'd have a very different relationship to lightning if each of them were 2200 nuke's worth of energy. Incidentally, this puts the US electrical power generation per year at 250,000 bombs/year, which is an intriguing way of looking at it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit... [2]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=4178%20terawatt%20hours%20in%20joules https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=4178%20terawatt%20hour... [3]: https://www.justintools.com/unit-conversion/energy.php?k1=hiroshima-bomb-explosion&k2=joules https://www.justintools.com/unit-conversion/energy.php?k1=hi...
• nirse 1y ago
  Secondary school physics teacher here: The article is conflating power (watt or joule per second) and energy (joule or kilowatt-hour), so any claim they make is nonsense and the article shouldn't be taken seriously. My students make the same mistake all the time but they don't get to publish it :-) Power is energy per time unit (thus: energy = power x time), so while the power of a lightning strike is very high (~10GW), the overall energy isn't because it only lasts for a very short duration (apparently the duration of a lightning event is hard to define, [1] says about 0,5 seconds, other places mention much shorter durations, ~10us). So if that 10GW lasts for 0,5 seconds, the total energy is 1,4MWh, which is 1/6 to 1/10 of the electrical energy an average American household consumes in a year[2]. [1] https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/16/547/2023/ https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/16/547/2023/ [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricity-use-in-homes.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...