For me, lightning is amazing for two specific reasons. The first is it’s a raw and unmatched power; and second, its unpredictability. Sadly, it is both of these reasons why commercial-scale power generation is not around — and probably won’t be around any time soon. Even though lightning occurs about 1.4 billion times per year, only a fraction hits the ground, and of those that do, we have no idea where they will strike. This is the problem with unpredictability: we have no real idea where to build the generation stations. Even if we did manage to get a bunch of flashes to hit our generator, there is a very large amount of power produced in very short time — which means we need to somehow harness it without destroying our systems, and somehow store the energy for later.

Even with all these downfalls some experiments have been done! In 2007 a company was able to capture lightning and power a lightbulb for about 20 mins, however after more experiments they determined that large scale systems just can’t be done.

So even though there is so much power in lightning, the cost of harnessing it is probably too much for any company to invest. Chances are, better alternatives like wind, solar or nuclear are way more feasible for large scale power generation.

Originally published on Guru Magazine’s website: www.gurumagazine.org.

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