Capacitor to store lightning?

[BennyF]

To all who want to have a serious discussion of methods for collecting and storing electrical energy, using lightning as your sole source:

My schematics deal with the high voltage and current in the typical lightning bolt. They also deal with the high probability that any lightning rod can get hit more than once in a single thunderstorm. They also deal with the issue of how to discharge a HV capacitor bank safely and in a manner that allows for two uses of the electricity.

1. Converting some of it to AC, to be used in a company office, and
2. Using the rest, as low-voltage DC, in the well-known endothermic chemical reaction sometimes called WATER ELECTROLYSIS.

The amount of electrical energy, measured in Joules, contained in a single lightning bolt, is "certainly significant". That's a quote from a person who was working for one of our national laboratories, and I can supply the link.

I want to take this SIGNIFICANT amount of electrical energy and store it for the benefit of a privately-owned corporation. There will be no donation of electricity to an electric grid, and there will be no giveaway of my schematics until after I get my patent.

Adieu,

Benny

 

[MacGyver1968]

The Iowa thunderstorm I documented earlier peaked at over 450 strikes PER MINUTE. That was just one storm. I have no idea whether this storm damaged any buildings or killed any people, but I do know (because I've seen the stats) that 80-100 people EVERY DAMN YEAR die from lightning IN THIS COUNTRY ALONE.

Almost all of the localized lightning detectors I have access to, because I know their web addresses, are in this country, but there is one exception. I have the web address for a lightning scan somewhere in Sasketchewan, Canada, and yes, I've seen lightning strikes appear on this website.

I also mentioned earlier that lightning hits the CN Tower in Toronto over twenty times every year. The actual figure I saw was 26 times every year. Wouldn't it be nice if a large cap bank were to be installed in their building, so that all this electricity could be collected, stored, and converted into AC for their own benefit?

But most of those strikes were cloud to cloud. The simple fact is that very few people are killed or injured due to lightning strikes. Compared to the risks we take every time we get in a car, the risk is negligible. In order for your facilities to protect the public from lightning strikes, they would have to be located everywhere.

There is a difference between dreaming and reality.

 

[Billy T]

... In any event, I'm getting even more nervous, because I think that you're not just here to discuss physics, or its' subset - electricity. I think you want a look at my schematics, so that you can beat me to the patent office, so I will limit what I write about my system, to keep you (and everybody else) deliberately in the dark. You can see my schematics after I get my patent, which won't specify voltage ratings on the caps, current ratings on the wires, or the size of my office staff. Benny

Perhaps you missed the last paragraph of post 194? Here it is again:

... {post 194} As I have already told you, most of the voltage will be across the inductance and the lightning will just continue its air arc to ground, by-passing your circuit. One does not want or need to see your circuit and given how ignorant you are about all this, it would only be good for laughs.

You probably do not know that ALL capacitors have some inductance. You can get a pretty good measure of it by shorting them out with a copper strap (at low voltage for safety reasons). They will "ring" -I.e. reverse charge after passing thru zero voltage. The period of the ringing frequency is mainly the LC time constant and you know what the C is. The rate at which this ringing oscillation dies down is a measure of their internal resistance, assuming your shorting strap is making good contact with the terminals of the capacitor.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Captain, I found this tidbit a few years ago, during the early part of my four-year ongoing research project. The idea was posted by someone with a screen name "Vernon", and it's dated 09/24/01. The text of the idea is quite long, so I'll simply include a link to the web page:

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Lightning_20Power_20Plant

Please note that the page also has other "half-baked" ideas on how to collect the voltage (their terminology) from lightning.

Benny

Yes, I thought it was half baked, but sending up a balloon to scoop up electricity is an attractive pipe dream. It could follow a thundercloud around.
Could you charge up a car battery for example? Or would it take too long, or not charge at all? I don't mean with a line to the ground, I mean on its own. Obviously you'd need some other electromatriggerry widgets along with it to collect the electricity.

 

[BennyF]

There is a difference between dreaming and reality.

I received a letter in the mail yesterday. It was dated April 1st, and it came from a man I've never met in Omaha, Nebraska. The man says that Warren Buffett recently had a bad argument with his family, and that he's decided to cut them all out of his will. Warren decided to give the bulk of his money to me after picking my name out of the phone book. The man who wrote to me asked me to send him a check for $500 to cover the paperwork at the Omaha courthouse and some incidental expenses.

When I received the letter, I faxed it to a U.S.-based capacitor manufacturer, along with a purchase order for a few million 200kv caps. They called me a few hours later, telling me that they would begin round-the-clock production of the caps as soon as my letter was authenticated.




What's that, you say? You don't think the letter will stand up to a rigorus authentication procedure? Well I have some bad news for you.

The U.S. Patent Office doesn't care whether the letter is genuine or not.

When I send them my application, as I expect to do later this year, they will not check my bank statements, because I won't be applying to them for a permit to BUILD a large capacitor bank, I'll be asking them to examine the SCIENCE of a large capacitor bank.

My application, when it's received, will first be checked by their financial people, to see whether I've paid the application fees properly.

Next, it'll be examined by a clerk, who will verify that all the proper forms have been submitted, and that all the "i"s have been dotted and all the "t"s have been crossed.

Next, it'll be given to a higher-grade clerk, who will check to see whether I'm trying to patent something that has already been patented.

Finally, my application will be tentatively assigned a class number, and examined by an electrical engineer, who will look at the invention and who will decide whether it does what I say it will do. He (or she) will study what happens when a lightning bolt hits my invention without the necessity of seeing a scale model. That's their ultimate criteria - the science of an invention or a method for accomplishing a particular task.




MacGyver, you're absolutely correct. There is a big difference between dreaming and reality. Let's talk about reality for a moment.

According to the nice gentleman at Argonne, lightning has 5e8 Joules.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy00/phy00876.htm

It's travelling down a 3/4" (outside diameter) stranded copper wire, and all of a sudden it sees a current divider with a hundred current paths. One-hundredth of the total, or 5e6 Joules, will go into each of the 100 paths.

Each path has 100 HV caps. No, I'm going to inherit a king's ransom, so let's put A THOUSAND caps in each current path, all 200kv. Simultaneously, in each of the 100 paths, when the 5e6 Joules sees this, it divides again, this time into a thousand equal pieces, so each of the thousand caps (in each path) will store 5e3 Joules, in other words, 5,000 Joules.

Did I mention? The capacitor manufacturer told me that a bored engineer had produced a design for a 500kv capacitor, but they had shelved the idea because they thought that nobody would want to buy it. Now here I am, with a purchase order for millions of them!




Yes, MacGyver, I know the difference between dreaming and reality. Reality is a paid-up application to the U.S. Patent Office. Dreaming is what happens when I say that stranded copper wire just isn't good enough, and that as long as I'm going to be the next Billionaire, I'm going to have a mile of wire manufactured from stranded SILVER.

 

[Neverfly]

oh.... The thread is a Joke.


I GET IT! AHHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA!
Good one man. OH really... you had me going. But the Letter was too much. Sheesh, I feel so silly, now.



Go on, do another one!

 

[Captain Kremmen]

How about this capacitor which will store 11500 Joules for $600

13500 ufd, 1300 Volt, 11500 Joule Oil-Filled Energy Storage Capacitor
Here is the "holy grail" answer to the high energy enthusiast experimenting with electro-kinetic rail guns, coil guns, high energy discharges, magnetizers, etc. Capacitors are un-used in their original packing. Size is 28" x 13-½" x 6-¾" and weight is 90 pounds. Capacitors have dual terminals for low inductance or convenient series and paralleling. Ten of these connected in parallel will produce 115,000 joules. May be connected in series for augmented rails, parallel for standard configurations, or used individually for segmented rail systems. These are NWL WA2840 models used by the military for electro-kinetic mortar systems, normally costing over $2300 each new. Note these units are only available to qualified personnel.

http://www.amazing1.com/capacitors.htm

These are a fraction of the usual cost.
Arithmetic time again.
A bolt of lightning has 500000000 Joules
devide this by 11500 and multiply by 600 to get the price in Dollars.

You will need 43,478 of them. Cost $26,086,956 to capture the energy from one lightning bolt. Convert the Joules to Kwh.
139 Kwh.

A better scheme would be to buy up donkeys to push a wheel round.
In fact, give me £26 Million and I'll push the wheel round.
I'll even wear donkey ears.

 

[MacGyver1968]

Benny,

Let's go with the 500MJ number from your link. Most of the energy from a lightning bolt is converted to heat during the strike...something like 90%....but let's not worry with that, and just assume that 500MJ is the total amount of energy that you can capture.

500MJ sounds like a lot, but it's only 138KW/h worth of electricity. TXU charges me 13.8 cents per KW/h. That's about $19. My tiny apartment uses about 500 KW/h per month. It would require 4 of these strikes a month just to power my apartment.

Even if the caps you are buying only cost only $1 each, that's still millions of dollars. It would require you to capture 52 thousand 500MJ lightning strikes to produce a million dollars worth of electricity. How many years will that take? ...and that's just the cost of the caps...it doesn't include the bank of batteries or inverters or rent on a facility large enough to house them, or the cost of the hydrogen conversion equipment, and tanks to store everything in.

You really need to do a full financial analysis of your plan. You're spending millions of dollars to extract $19 of "free" energy. That just doesn't make economic sense. No investor or bank is going to loan you millions of dollars to build something that offers such a low return on investment.

 

[BennyF]

These are NWL WA2840 models used by the military for electro-kinetic mortar systems, normally costing over $2300 each new. Note these units are only available to qualified personnel.

I wonder how anyone would qualify to buy them, and where you might be able to find some used ones at a steep discount to the price that the military paid.

Nice thought on the donkeys, but they leave a bit too much crap lying around.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Read the post and you'll find out!
If you employ me instead of the donkeys, I promise not to crap anywhere.

As regards getting the equipment, surely membership of sciforums is qualification enough.

 

[MacGyver1968]

What's funny...donkeys would be more economically feasible.

$26 Million would buy you aprox. 20,000 donkeys @ $1300 a piece. "Donkey power" is an actual unit of power like horsepower. 1hp = 745 W....1dp= 250 W

So with 20,000 donkeys, you could generate 5MW. Work them 8 hours a day, and that's 40MW/h. At 13.8 cents that's $5500 worth of electricity everyday!

 

[BennyF]

If you employ me instead of the donkeys, I promise not to crap anywhere.

You're probably a high-maintenance piece of equipment, wanting a cigarette break every ten minutes, wanting a compliment every TWO minutes, and always asking for food and water. Can't you work without a constant supply of food and water? Can't you work until at least ten o'clock at night? And why do you always ask for Christmas off with pay?

Mr. Scrooge

 

[Billy T]

... Nice thought on the donkeys, but they leave a bit too much crap lying around....

Yes donkey power equal to the annual average power from lighting bolts at any one location would produce a lot of crap in that year, but if sold as fertilizer it would bring in at least 100 time more money than selling the energy you can collect from lighting. (Even if you assume you could somehow capture all the energy of a lightning bolt - i.e. avoid heating the air, producing thunder etc., which is where about 95% or more of the lightning's energy is now dissipated.)

There is a song: "Who stopped the rain?"
We need to write one entitled: "Benny stopped the thunder." he, hee, heee!

 

[BennyF]

Hi, Billy. Back to square one, are we? You might want to check in with the scientists at Camp Blanding, Florida, to see how much electrical energy (measured in Joules, I suppose) they've measured at the ground.

AFTER the lightning bolt has traveled through a few miles of open air.

As for me, I trust the 5e8 Joule measurement that Argonne reports, with allowances for the differences between average amounts and peak amounts. I doubt that they've sent up any airplanes into thunderstorms, just to stick a Franklin Rod out the window.

Now admit it. You haven't seen my schematics, so you have no bloody idea how I plan on tapping into the peak of a lightning bolt.:shrug:

I'll give you a hint. I'm not going to insert a high-value resistor in series with my current divider. That would waste way too much energy in the form of heat. Capacitors normally have a high initial current flow when they're charged, and that will be true for the capacitors in my cap bank, you know, the one with a hundred branches (maybe more) and a thousand caps in each branch. Just ask the patent office if you don't believe me.

One more thing, Billy. You speculated that lightning would bypass my whole apparatus because of, if I remember you correctly, the "system inductance". I think you're underestimating the qualities of my collector. I won't specify the details, but I will tell you this. I won't be using Ben Franklin's iron rod.

 

[MacGyver1968]

As for me, I trust the 5e8 Joule measurement that Argonne reports,

Benny....500MJ is still only 139KW/h of electricity! For some reason, you keep ignoring this fact...I'm not sure why. Why in the world would you spend 100's of thousands or even millions of dollars to build a facility to capture $19 worth of electricity at a time?

 

[Billy T]

Benny....500MJ is still only 139KW/h of electricity! For some reason, you keep ignoring this fact...I'm not sure why. Why in the world would you spend 100's of thousands or even millions of dollars to build a facility to capture $19 worth of electricity at a time?

Most of the assumed 5E8J will be dissipated in heating the air long before it gets near the earth. Even if Benny could get that remaining energy to enter his collector (instead of just continue the air arc to ground) he would get less than one dollars worth.

SUMMARY - What Benny is dreaming about violates both physics and economics.

 

[BennyF]

Yes donkey power equal to the annual average power from lighting bolts at any one location would produce a lot of crap in that year, but if sold as fertilizer it would bring in at least 100 time more money than selling the energy you can collect from lighting.

Billy, Billy, Billy. You've accused me more than once of not reading your posts, and here you are, ignoring several of mine.

I never said that I wanted to sell electricity.

I have said that I thought I could disconnect my company office from the electric grid, because I thought (rightly or wrongly) that I would have enough AC (converted from DC) to keep my lights on. That's not the same thing as saying that I would be selling electricity.

In fact, Billy, I have said several times what my goals are after the DC electricity is collected and stored - to feed part of it into a high-wattage DC-AC inverter and put the rest of it through an electrolyzer, convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, and sell those gases. The H2 may be stored in a metal hydride, as I've said a few times, and the O2 may get sold to hospitals and nursing homes, as I've said several times, but I've never said that I wanted to compete with established electric utilities for their customers. It's just not economical.

Whether the humongous cap bank is economical is a worthy subject for discussion here, but please don't misquote me. I have no intention of selling electricity.

Benny

 

[BennyF]

Benny....500MJ is still only 139KW/h of electricity! For some reason, you keep ignoring this fact...I'm not sure why. Why in the world would you spend 100's of thousands or even millions of dollars to build a facility to capture $19 worth of electricity at a time?

Isn't that the "average" measurement of the energy in a lightning bolt? Didn't I say that I could capture the peak values?

I know I didn't say HOW I could do it, but you have to give me credit for restating my goals without a typo, don't you?

 

[MacGyver1968]

Yes.. it's the amount of energy in a typical lightning bolt...some will be stronger..some will be weaker...if you average it all out it's around 500MJ. I'm just using your number. It's also the total amount of energy in the bolt, not counting what is lost heating atmosphere on the way down. I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say "capture the peak values".

 

[Captain Kremmen]

For some reason, he thinks that the peak flow of energy, even if it lasts only a fraction of a second, is a measure of how much energy can be captured.

That's why he prefers to talk about peak wattage.

You won't get this idea out of his head no matter what you do.