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Anyone want to run the maths on an afternoons lightning as renewable energy?
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.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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