Lightning is extremely intense making it difficult to control and harness. It is also very short-lived meaning that the total energy is still pretty small.
Imagine lightning is like a giant water balloon exploding all at once — super powerful, but over in just a tiny blink.
Here’s why we can’t easily use that energy:
1. It’s too fast – A lightning strike lasts less than a second. It’s like trying to catch a fire hose blast with a paper cup. We don’t have the tech to grab that much energy, that quickly.
2. It’s super powerful but unpredictable – A single lightning bolt has a lot of energy (enough to power a small town for a short time), but we don’t know exactly when or where it will strike. That makes it really hard to plan or build equipment to catch it.
3. It’s dangerous – Lightning can melt metal and explode trees. Building something that can survive a direct hit and store the energy safely is really hard and expensive.
4. Storage is tricky – Even if we caught the energy, we’d need a huge battery to store it, and current batteries just aren’t good at grabbing and holding that kind of sudden blast.
So in short: lightning is like a wild, super-powerful burst that’s too fast, random, and dangerous for us to tame — at least with today’s technology.
The power from a lightning strike is extreme, like millions of volts. Electronics can’t handle those kinds of levels. There’s also no real way to store that energy. Batteries don’t charge at the blink of an eye or, rather, a flash of lightning. Additionally, lightning is random and unpredictable so installing a lot of infrastructure to sometimes catch a strike wouldn’t be worth it.
I suppose we technically could, but to quote Dr. Emmett L. Brown on the subject of lightning bolts, “Unfortunately, you never know when or where one is going to strike”.
What makes more sense, sticking out a lightning rod in the hopes that the weather conditions happen to be right, or taking a bunch of coal that you’ve already gotten people to dig up and shovel that into a furnace day and night?
ELI5 is that there’s not much energy for you to collect from lightning on the ground, and it’s hard to capture because it’s concentrated in an incredibly small area only for an incredibly brief period of time. Capturing natural lightning is also really impractical because of how inconsistent it is
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Lightning is extremely intense making it difficult to control and harness. It is also very short-lived meaning that the total energy is still pretty small.
We use electricity all day long.
Lightning happens only sometimes, only somewhere, in unpredictable amounts.
Imagine lightning is like a giant water balloon exploding all at once — super powerful, but over in just a tiny blink.
Here’s why we can’t easily use that energy:
So in short: lightning is like a wild, super-powerful burst that’s too fast, random, and dangerous for us to tame — at least with today’s technology.
The power from a lightning strike is extreme, like millions of volts. Electronics can’t handle those kinds of levels. There’s also no real way to store that energy. Batteries don’t charge at the blink of an eye or, rather, a flash of lightning. Additionally, lightning is random and unpredictable so installing a lot of infrastructure to sometimes catch a strike wouldn’t be worth it.
Turns out it really doesn’t want to be harnessed.
https://images.app.goo.gl/mfWYATWzHDSPFxrb8
Debbie Parker captured the exact moment a lightning hit a tree in Moorefield, Hardy County, West Virginia on June 23, 2022
I suppose we technically could, but to quote Dr. Emmett L. Brown on the subject of lightning bolts, “Unfortunately, you never know when or where one is going to strike”.
What makes more sense, sticking out a lightning rod in the hopes that the weather conditions happen to be right, or taking a bunch of coal that you’ve already gotten people to dig up and shovel that into a furnace day and night?
There’s a whole relatively easy to understand Wikipedia page on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy
ELI5 is that there’s not much energy for you to collect from lightning on the ground, and it’s hard to capture because it’s concentrated in an incredibly small area only for an incredibly brief period of time. Capturing natural lightning is also really impractical because of how inconsistent it is