For a related topic and a future video, why hasn't the world gone back to Tesla's free energy invention? The whole world could stop burning coal and interfering in waterways, and spending money to provide electricity for their regions! It would be a win-win for everyone, including the planet!
You forgot to talk about harvesting the potential difference BEFORE the lightning that would prevent the lightning itself, the electricity would be constant.
I read about this other doctor from the 1800s who used a lightning strike to bring a guy, who was composed of body parts from different dead people, to life.
Others already pointed out the mistake in the video at 5:46: 1000 GW * 30 microseconds is 30 Megawatt-seconds, not 30 Watt-seconds. Maybe you can add a second correction to the video description.
There is a big problem with this video: at 0:40, it is mentioned that lightning contains billions of joules and then at 5:40, it becomes 8 kWh. As 1kWh = 3.6 million joules (both are units of energy), 8 kWh gives just under 29 million joules. What happened with the billions ???
@@mitodunn7179that would make a lot of sense, heat also, like the lighting makes air into plasma, that's a lot of heat. But also they did say that P = V*I is ohm's law so... Maybe its just wrong? Idk
Yeah, I’m not particularly good with math but that didn’t seem right to me either. Complete change from the first half to the second half of the video. Hoping it was just an honest mistake and not an attempt to disregard and ridicule new ideas for sustainable energy sources.
@@nisper5396 I trust their team, so probably just a mistake by them or this commenter (I didn't check any of the math). But trying to harness energy from lightning is nowhere near a new idea (remember that dude with the kite?), and its unsuitability for a large scale power source has been well known for ages.
Then you haven't actually looked it up before, because the concept requires zero math to understand... the explanation is frickin EVERYWHERE, presented just as simply as here... so...
@@joshyoung1440 I am so glad that you're one of the folks who can read something on a piece of paper and instantly grasp it. I don't. Plenty of folks don't learn that way. I enjoy reading, but it's not really the best way for my brain to latch onto concepts and retain them. The presentation here "clicked" for me in a way books did not.
@@joshyoung1440you don't get that a lot. Most textbook just present you with C = Q·V and say it's charging and discharging. Why? Who tf knows. For a good while in my student life, I thought capacitor is some sort of spare battery instead of voltage regulator.
@@vectorsahel5420 I definitely don't think so, there are a lot more non-ohmic components to deal with than particles which don't obey F = ma in everyday life
@@mastershooter64There aren't really any ohmic components tho, also V = IR, or V/I = R isn't really ohms law, its just the definition of resistance, a component that follows ohm's law is just a component that it's resistance is constant, of which there's none
That's not Ohm's Law, which is that current equals voltage divided by resistance (I = E/R), where resistance is measured in Ohms. What you describe is Watt's law and the unit of power is the Watt. Come on SciShow... that's a pretty egregious error regarding arguablly the most basic and important formula in electronics.
@@joshyoung1440 - for a science show: Yes. It's not a one-man show but a collaboration, and they should have definitely caught it. . . . What else of what they say cannot be trusted?
@@joshyoung1440 sorry equivalent?? No this is the nonsense attitude that ends with a flat earth and we didn't go to the moon - down the pub being wrong in a minor way might be acceptable BUT it's not ok in a science video and the producers should have caught it at the time (obviously viewers did) and certainly should have that as the pinned comment, not "buy our calender"
@@myuu22 Absolutely! Plus i remember hearing Gary Brannan and Matt Gray speaking that line simultaneously, unplanned. ... and by Gary and Chris i mean "everybody's favourite Gary Brannan" and "the bounciest man on the internet" 😁
Why don't we just harvest the static electricity that builds up in the air that would eventually turn into a lightning strike. This would prevent us from trying to find exactly when and where lightning would strike and also what to do with that enormous amount of energy all at once
Because it still wouldn't add up to too much, relative to the gigantic area you would need. It would just be solar panels with extra steps and then only work a couple times per year.
Yeah, it's only so brutal because it has to build up a lot of tension to then cross the air to the ground, if you catch it up higher, you can certainly get easier loads more often. But then again, it doesn't seem to be much energy either way, so probably not worth the trouble. On to my next project, harvesting the energy of tectonic plaques by using the slow but powerful motion appart at a continental rift!
@@GabrielPettier Regarding the "Powering your house by tectonic plates": You're not the first with that idea - XKCD, for instance (who else 😉...) made a video about that (among other methods): th-cam.com/video/j1tcyEo2tQk/w-d-xo.html - your idea starts at 2:45, but the whole thing is worth the five minutes to watch 😁...
hi, I'm an engineer who works in the field of lightning protection and all I'll say is that the conclusion is correct but there's quite a bit of mistakes getting there. Lightning is not a practical form of energy that we can capture and use long term but it is very impressive and destructive.
The average kWh stat is insane, though... My household (admittedly just me and my wife, in Brazil) uses about 6kWh on a hot summer month! A single lightning strike would do
As children, my sisters and I used to spend summer vacations with our grandparents in Florida. On stormy afternoons, we would sit on the covered porch and watch the lightening crack down from the sky and hit the local TV station's transmission tower. It could get quite eventful!
Odd, I come up with a different value. 1000 GW * 30 μs = 30 MW·s, that's 30 Megawatt·seconds. Not 30 Watt·seconds. Off by a factor of 10⁶. Roughly 8.33 KW·h. So you missed the Mega but got the right result.
Yesterday was a night with a mild storm with a lot of lightning really strong ones and this question stuck me and thank you for exampling the possibility and difficulty in achieving this easily miss understood task.
Wait, 30kWh per house per DAY? I'm using under 120 per MONTH! Granted, in a small apartment, but I have some older appliances, a PS5, a gaming PC and I work from home! My family members who live in single family houses use around 300-400 kWh per month. 30 per day is absurd!
We are a houshold of 4 people with everything (tumble dryer, dishwasher, two big freezers, a lot of tech and TVs and routers) and even we average at arount 6kWh per day. So yeah something is completely off here.
Lightning. Gives off many types of energy!! Light, Heat and sound energy. You could capture that instantly in an electrolyte liquid. The rest of the heat could be recovered turned into steam. So you have heat and charged solution
@@FlushGorgon yea not renewable but a massive step away from coal and oil, and hopefully a predecessor of fusion reactors which are technically not renewable but a universally abundant fuel.
What no. Mica is a dielectric and Ohm's law equals voltage, not power, to the current times the resistance. Dielectrics and insulators are not the same thing. Power and voltage are not interchangeable.
all of this forgets that what we see as lightning is actually the discharge of energy. from the moment that lighting starts being visible, it is the result of static electricity flowing through the air and exploding it on the way down (or up). As soon as energy starts doing anything either traveling or producing heat or light, it loses watts. The value of energy calculated from a lighting strike takes into account all the work it took to blow up the air on the way down. The best "lighting" collector would theoretically eliminate lighting altogether and would just scrape away the potential energy straight from the clouds. The depiction of how a capacitor works is perfect to describe what is happening in a storm. The clouds the ground beneath the clouds and the air between them make up the three components of the capacitor which means that when you see a lighting strike, it's just the charge shorting out. A theoretical perfect lighting generator would basically be a perpetual cloud that is constantly under turbulence which is only possible with gravity and different fluids (air and vapor) and some thermal dynamics thrown in. This starts to look a lot like a perpetual motion machine though.
Something I dreamed of at 18, but realized that the resistance involved in the capacitors would mean that the discharge would take a less resistive path in the first place, or would jump off somewhere along the path. A more viable project is the continuous collection of the ground-air charge difference in those lightning-prone areas using helium-filled balloons and graphene-loaded cabling. The high likelihood of these collectors being struck by lighting means that you could effectively harness lightning as a byproduct, by creating designated jump-off points in the cable and conducting that super-high charge through some process involving slightly less resistance than lightning would encounter traveling through air. An example would be an expanded Zeldovich mechanism for generating nitrogen oxide as the charge passes from the jump-off conductor to an earth ground, through the air (or some other medium you want to process), inside an insulated container.
How about running that electrostatic energy to electrostatic motors, which could drive generators, which could charge a bank of batteries. This was implied to on the “Plasma Channel”.
0:38 I could be wrong, but I lived in Homestead, FL for a year, and boy howdy the thunderstorms there every day of summer in the afternoon all that moisture coming off the Everglades... so this looks very southern Florida to me. Also, I was thinking more like tethered balloons that constantly harvest the potential differential, not harvesting the strikes, that's silly.
Been waiting years for you guys to talk about Rayo del Catatumbo, I almost screamed out loud when el Lago de Maracaibo got mentioned 😭 As a Venezuelan who was born and raised in Maracaibo I grew up hearing the magnificence of this natural phenomenon and would love if you made an episode about it 🥺💛
They have talked about it in an episode before!! I can't remember which one, I'm afraid, but i definitely learnt about it from SciShow. I THINK the video might be called something about "strange lakes"?
8 kw/h per lightning strike. The average EV battery is around 80 kw/h. An EV car would need to get hit 10 times to charge its batteries for 300 miles of driving, and real time travel, if possible, probably would need so much more energy than that.
At 1:20 what do you mean "lightning strikes can be positive or negative"? Electrons are negatively charged so negative lightning makes sense, but what is positively charged lightning? A lightning strike of protons instead of electrons?
They mean directionality of current/electron flow, essentially. **An excess of electrons** in the stormcloud would result in electrons traveling from the stormcloud to the ground. **A lack of electrons** in the stormcloud would result in a lightning strike that pulls electrons from the ground to the stormcloud. If you captured the first type in a battery, and then the next lightning strike were of the second type, it would just drain the battery of the electrons gathered in the first strike. And even worse, unless you found some really clever way to completely isolate the charges you've already captured, a lightning strike of one type would just increase the chances of a lightning strike of the other type. Put a big rod into the air to attract electrons and store them? Well ok, now you have a really big rod sticking into the air with an excess of electrons. And more electrons certainly won't want to jump in to that rod anymore. In fact, the excess of electrons in the rod will want to jump back into the stormcloud.
@cbirch7302 makes sense, if we hook up a lightning rod to a bunch of capacitors that can handle the load, and it gets struck. Now we have a lightning strikes worth of electricity in capacitors trying to discharge through our rod, so it will likely arc back up to the clouds or maybe just the ground.
Glad to finally have a video on this, even knew about the Venezuelan lightning hot-spot. Thought it was feasible for the last decade. Never considered the watt-hour factor. Yeh, you get a whole lot of VA, but for milliseconds. Thanks!
When I was a science teacher I had a student conduct a science fair project where they simulated lightning on small scale to vaporize water in a closed volume to create pressure to turn a turbine to convert it to mechanical energy… it worked.
We need a way to regulate lightning storms or discharges. I once saw a Professor experiment with directing the lightning to a specific spot by tying wire to a small rocket. It looked like a toy but, it worked consistently. The lightning followed the wired to a metal spike that he buried in the ground. We need three strikes a day per home.
You know the video is bad when literally all visible top comments are pointing out obvious elementary school mistakes considering TH-cam comments aren't exactly known for it's intellegence
great video! really appreciated the insights shared. but honestly, i can't help but think that with all the tech advancements, we should be exploring lightning as a more viable energy source. it seems strange that we're not leveraging something so powerful and natural. what do you guys think?
According to my research, if your statement about lightning in LA and unicorns, there must be loads of unicorns in LA! There were approximately 1,200 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes over the nearly three decades between 1988 and 2017. That may not be many lightning strikes, it's a lot of unicorns tho!
I think it's possible but we might not have the infrastructure to make it possible. The problem is why we try to harness it when it strikes when you can do it before it strikes or even prevent it.
Side Note: If we ever figure out super-capacitors, we could eventually make lightning stations not as their own sole form of power, but in conjunction with other forms. If lightning strikes a wind turbine or solar farm, it has the potential to be really bad. But if we could make lightning stations such as you described to be more like a super form of lightning rod that uses super capacitors to catch the power and use those capacitors to then charge up power storage like batteries to put energy into the grid at a more controlled pace, that might offer a form of protection for the solar/wind farms while adding some extra energy to the grid. We need synergistic solutions, not some mythical magic bullet power lol.
Idk, I just needed a few bricks, some steel and copper wire for this, granted, it didn't make much power, it was only like 23% efficient Leaving Nauvis for this was worth it, had to grow the factory
I really appreciate you dumbing down the maths as much as possible for this!! If only this was actually possible and easier to do... sounds like if we could figure it out better, it might work in the future, especially if we're going to get more storms along with climate change...
Isnt there a high voltage at those altitudes mere hundreds of feet up? Imagine if we harvest this trickle amounts of power. Anything built to harvest this power is going to be something you build just once and then benefit from for the rest of the time its up there.
We don't have to capture the entire spark into capacitors. We can catch a portion of the electromagnetic pulse emitted by the lightning, perhaps using parabolic dishes or other types or aerials, and dump the energy into a capacitor array. Then the stored charge must be discharged into a heavy duty Capacitor inductor circuit where the electrical energy oscillates between a capacitor bank and an induction coil. Then we can tap off the oscillating field using transformer coils.
This is so silly... they say it's Billions of joules at 04:44 as if that's a big number then they say it's actually just a few KWh and that that's a small number both of these are units of energy - so which is it? a lot of energy or not a a lot of energy? Also because KWh and joules are measuring the same thing (quantity of energy) they are directly convertible - 1B joules = 277~KWh. So logically it can't be both BILLIONS WITH A B Joules and 8kwh so which is it? I'd say it a small thing but it seems like the whole point of the video, it's like your saying: 1. Lighting is cool and it's have a ton of energy 2. it's difficult to capture, but there are ways 3. It's actually not that great
What might work is using the large-scale atmospheric electrical fields *behind* lightning as a source of power, since doing that is as easy as creating an artificial circuit to replace the natural circuit that lightning would otherwise create for itself - which is in turn as easy as just launching 2 cable-tethered balloons up into the air to 2 different altitudes (one tethered balloon to 40000ft and another to 5000ft, for example) and using a miles-long wire to connect them. That might in turn actually prevent the charges from building up enough to become lightning strikes to begin with because they'd have a continuous path to flow through that we created for them. Wiring up a thunderstorm like this in a way that uses atmospheric charge separation as a source of power would also allow us to produce green hydrogen much less expensively, since, well, there's also a lot of water in those storm clouds that can be easily split by electrolysis. That hydrogen could then go on to fill gaps between storms by being pumped through grid-scale fuel cells.
Wait an 0:41 you say that a lightning strike releases billions of joules, 1 billion joules is 277 Kilowatt hour, at 5:49 you say that a lightning releases 8 kilowatt hour. Those are pretty different numbers!
Electro-spun carbon nano-tube mats rolled onto glidcop. Highest thermal and electrical conductivity. Highest surface area, can trap and be bound to rare earths, can be made into highest energy density capacitors. Top shelf tech.
the title of the video is mildly misleading. I thought that the video was going to say that utilizing lighting is practically impossible. instead of that the video is about why we aren't utilizing lighting as whole as a renewable energy source.
Aw, that was a bummer ending. Still, sounds like it wouldn't be a bad support system, have one of them running in the background (in a place that gets lightning a lot) in addition to the main power generators yeah?
The idea is correct. The challenge is simply in building it. Think Franklin's kite. It didn't really need to get struck by lightning for it to collect charges from the air.
"Lightening strikes can be positive or negative, which means one can literally cancel out the other." Can someone clarify this point? I was under the impression that lightening/electricity was a discharge and flow of electrons which by definition are negatively charged. Not clear on the positive part.
5:42 1 Terawatt , (1,000,000,000,000 joules ) for 30 micro seconds is 30 Gigawatts 30,000,000,000 joules ) ( 30KWH is 108 Megajoules of energy) you could power 277 homes - also no home should ever be using 30 KWH a day .
The design, overall, is cool for the lightning rod and capacitors. Now, if it was possible to not rely on nature (open space) have that evaporation in a controlled environment (closed space) then it might be reasonable to get more then one strike a day. The next question could be to know how big the environment (wave guide) would have to be and how much climate control is required. Thanks for the video.
5:46 you lost the trail on magnitudes - 10 megavolts x 100 kiloamps is 10^7 volts x 10^5 amps, so 10^12 watts. A microsecond is one millionth (10^-6) of a second, so 30 microseconds is 30 x 10^-6, or 3 x 10^-5 seconds. So that's 3.33 x 10^6 watt seconds, or 3.33 megawatt seconds. However, you're still right that it's a negligible amount of power. To convert watt seconds to watt hours, you divide by 3600 (60 seconds x 60 minutes). 3.33 x 10^6 ÷ 3600 = 925 watt hours. You can a small space heater for an hour on one lightning strike. You could run an electric tea kettle for ~45 minutes.
Lightning is what happens when energy is released. Using it to power anything is like trying to toast a s'more in the heat of a detonating hand grenade. We'd be better off tapping into the charge potential of the clouds before it builds enough to arc. Think of the clouds and ground like the charged plates in a capacitor, because that's essentially what they are.
Building a 10MV capacitor which can store 30MWs would require something like 100 square meters of thick copper for each plate. The cost makes it prohibitive.
Why not set up a city wide lightning rod array, have them all meet at a heat sink, and use the power to boil water, turn a turbine, and it basically becomes another regular power plant. It should at least work in Venezuela. If nothing else it would be cool as heck.
If we could collect all the lightnings hitting France in a year (including all the fields, forests and lakes), that would be enough to power the country for about 3 hours. If you use that electric energy to create heat to turn a turbine to create electricity, you may loose half of that power, in dissipated heat, reducing the yearly collect to 90 minutes of useful energy for the country.
Positive lightning isn't actually a positive charge... Which is whats being implied here. It's just a difference in what's causing the leader, the cloud or the ground.
Well, I kind of figured that capturing lightning for electricity would have some problems, or we'd already be doing it, even if only on a small scale. But I didn't realize the extent of those problems.
Because lightning strikes on the same spot don't happen every day, and cloud seeding is not a guarantee to produce lightning, they figured the arithmetic and found out that it could take 120 years before you break even on the investment cost to build such a lightning power plant. Other sources of energy would be more economical.
8 kw/h per lightning strike. You'd only have to get hit by lightning in your car over 10 times a day to charge charge your EV, for it to drive 300 miles a day and that's assuming your lightning flux capacitor is 100% efficient.
Yep that doesn't make sense! There is another name for the watt-second. It is called a Joule. Actually, the calculation gives 30 megawatts-seconds (or megaJoules) which is effectively about 8kWh. What happened to the billions of joules from the beginning of the video which are now reduced by two orders of magnitude, I have no idea at all...
Get your 2025 Complexly calendar now complexly.info/scishowcalendar
For a related topic and a future video, why hasn't the world gone back to Tesla's free energy invention? The whole world could stop burning coal and interfering in waterways, and spending money to provide electricity for their regions! It would be a win-win for everyone, including the planet!
You forgot to talk about harvesting the potential difference BEFORE the lightning that would prevent the lightning itself, the electricity would be constant.
Please review your video cause it has a major flaw.
I saw a documentary about a scientist in 1955 that was able to use a lightning strike to power a flux capacitor to travel to 1985
I read about this other doctor from the 1800s who used a lightning strike to bring a guy, who was composed of body parts from different dead people, to life.
Great Scott! @@doktormcnasty Now thats Wilder!
@@doktormcnasty Heavy!
He then discovered quantum entanglement as his test subject he sent to 1985 came BACK from 1985!
Beat me to the joke! Well done.
So, you're striking down the idea?
HEH
It just didn't have enough power behind it.
I'm just shocked how much resistance this idea has gotten
Thunderous applause for that joke😂
This is the comment that needs to be on the top of the video 😅
Plz remove the ai bot with a #### for a pfp 😭
Others already pointed out the mistake in the video at 5:46: 1000 GW * 30 microseconds is 30 Megawatt-seconds, not 30 Watt-seconds. Maybe you can add a second correction to the video description.
SciShow screws up basic high school science and grade school math. 🤣
SciShow doesn't know the difference between Ohm's law and Watt's law.
"bear with me, there's going to me some math" *fumbles the math*
@@tdk99-i8nHence the "bear with me " part!
yeah but 30 megaWatt second is 8.3 Kwh...
There is a big problem with this video: at 0:40, it is mentioned that lightning contains billions of joules and then at 5:40, it becomes 8 kWh. As 1kWh = 3.6 million joules (both are units of energy), 8 kWh gives just under 29 million joules. What happened with the billions ???
Besides, the result of the calculation should not be 30 watts-seconds but 30 megawatts-seconds (I.e 30 megajoules)
Maybe the difference is the energy going to the light and sound produced?
@@mitodunn7179that would make a lot of sense, heat also, like the lighting makes air into plasma, that's a lot of heat.
But also they did say that P = V*I is ohm's law so... Maybe its just wrong? Idk
Yeah, I’m not particularly good with math but that didn’t seem right to me either. Complete change from the first half to the second half of the video. Hoping it was just an honest mistake and not an attempt to disregard and ridicule new ideas for sustainable energy sources.
@@nisper5396 I trust their team, so probably just a mistake by them or this commenter (I didn't check any of the math). But trying to harness energy from lightning is nowhere near a new idea (remember that dude with the kite?), and its unsuitability for a large scale power source has been well known for ages.
That is the first time I've UNDERSTOOD what the hell a capacitor actually is! Thank you for making it make sense for someone very non-math-inclined!
Next step : the flux capacitor!
Then you haven't actually looked it up before, because the concept requires zero math to understand... the explanation is frickin EVERYWHERE, presented just as simply as here... so...
@@joshyoung1440 I am so glad that you're one of the folks who can read something on a piece of paper and instantly grasp it. I don't.
Plenty of folks don't learn that way. I enjoy reading, but it's not really the best way for my brain to latch onto concepts and retain them. The presentation here "clicked" for me in a way books did not.
Next for you to read up on. Inductors, which are almost like capacitors, but they store electricity as a magnetic field
@@joshyoung1440you don't get that a lot. Most textbook just present you with C = Q·V and say it's charging and discharging. Why? Who tf knows. For a good while in my student life, I thought capacitor is some sort of spare battery instead of voltage regulator.
The formula for Ohm's law is V=IR. You are talking about Watt's Law is P = IV.
V=IR is seriously the goat equation, on par with F = ma
@@vectorsahel5420 I definitely don't think so, there are a lot more non-ohmic components to deal with than particles which don't obey F = ma in everyday life
@@mastershooter64There aren't really any ohmic components tho, also V = IR, or V/I = R isn't really ohms law, its just the definition of resistance, a component that follows ohm's law is just a component that it's resistance is constant, of which there's none
Lol imagine a science show trying to tell us what's what, spreading incorrect information.
Gotta love it.
Also; 30 KWh per day per household?! That's a mad average. In Denmark a house with 4 occupants use ≈ 14 KWh per day.
That's not Ohm's Law, which is that current equals voltage divided by resistance (I = E/R), where resistance is measured in Ohms. What you describe is Watt's law and the unit of power is the Watt. Come on SciShow... that's a pretty egregious error regarding arguablly the most basic and important formula in electronics.
You're right. How _egregious_ of them to mix up two equivalent laws. Please stop with the melodrama.
@@joshyoung1440 - for a science show: Yes. It's not a one-man show but a collaboration, and they should have definitely caught it.
. . . What else of what they say cannot be trusted?
@@Achill101 the numbers for example. One bolt of lightning contains about 1400kWh of energy, not only 8.
@@joshyoung1440 sorry equivalent??
No this is the nonsense attitude that ends with a flat earth and we didn't go to the moon - down the pub being wrong in a minor way might be acceptable BUT it's not ok in a science video and the producers should have caught it at the time (obviously viewers did) and certainly should have that as the pinned comment, not "buy our calender"
Oh and sarcasm as a response to a scientific correction??
*ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE GIGAWATTS?!*
At least.
Great Scott!
Jiggawatt
Flux capacitor..😮
Glad I’m not the only one who thought this too 🤣
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening
Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Figaro!
Not the reference I was expecting, but a welcome one.
@@myuu22 Absolutely! Plus i remember hearing Gary Brannan and Matt Gray speaking that line simultaneously, unplanned.
... and by Gary and Chris i mean "everybody's favourite Gary Brannan" and "the bounciest man on the internet" 😁
Galileo
@@BionicMilkaholic Galileo
3:33 I definitely tell my enemies about scishow
Why don't we just harvest the static electricity that builds up in the air that would eventually turn into a lightning strike. This would prevent us from trying to find exactly when and where lightning would strike and also what to do with that enormous amount of energy all at once
I like your thinking!!
Because it still wouldn't add up to too much, relative to the gigantic area you would need. It would just be solar panels with extra steps and then only work a couple times per year.
Yeah, it's only so brutal because it has to build up a lot of tension to then cross the air to the ground, if you catch it up higher, you can certainly get easier loads more often.
But then again, it doesn't seem to be much energy either way, so probably not worth the trouble.
On to my next project, harvesting the energy of tectonic plaques by using the slow but powerful motion appart at a continental rift!
Or one step back from that - the energy stored in this electric field came from moving air. Surely it can’t be too hard to extract energy from that. 😉
@@GabrielPettier Regarding the "Powering your house by tectonic plates": You're not the first with that idea - XKCD, for instance (who else 😉...) made a video about that (among other methods): th-cam.com/video/j1tcyEo2tQk/w-d-xo.html - your idea starts at 2:45, but the whole thing is worth the five minutes to watch 😁...
I have been asking this question for years! Thank you.
hi, I'm an engineer who works in the field of lightning protection and all I'll say is that the conclusion is correct but there's quite a bit of mistakes getting there. Lightning is not a practical form of energy that we can capture and use long term but it is very impressive and destructive.
The only thing lightning power is good for is sending a de Lorean back to the future when you forget your plutonium.
That's not actually true, lightning brought Dr. Frankenstein's monster to life!
Or for powering a factory to salvage tech from a dead alien civilization
@@alexsiemers7898 Or for animating a corpse composed of the body parts from multiple dead people.
@@doktormcnasty Classic 👏
About a week ago, lightning struck our house and destroyed our palasate motor, BOTH of our wifi routers, a Camera AND one monitor.
Owell no one cares
@@MaekarManastorm ass
womp womp
@@MaekarManastorm ew
and this is why you plug everything into power bars with surge protectors
Surely it's as easy as it was on my Factorio: Space Age playthrough on Fulgora!
I was looking for cracktorio references! Thank you!
The average kWh stat is insane, though... My household (admittedly just me and my wife, in Brazil) uses about 6kWh on a hot summer month! A single lightning strike would do
Can confirm, just gotta have a thousand accumulators and lightning rods placed everywhere :')
The amount of accumulators I need to do anything serious is ridiculous
Even in factorio lightning is tricky to capture if you don’t have enough accumulators to suck up all the energy.
As children, my sisters and I used to spend summer vacations with our grandparents in Florida. On stormy afternoons, we would sit on the covered porch and watch the lightening crack down from the sky and hit the local TV station's transmission tower. It could get quite eventful!
Odd, I come up with a different value. 1000 GW * 30 μs = 30 MW·s, that's 30 Megawatt·seconds. Not 30 Watt·seconds. Off by a factor of 10⁶. Roughly 8.33 KW·h. So you missed the Mega but got the right result.
Yesterday was a night with a mild storm with a lot of lightning really strong ones and this question stuck me and thank you for exampling the possibility and difficulty in achieving this easily miss understood task.
Wait, 30kWh per house per DAY? I'm using under 120 per MONTH! Granted, in a small apartment, but I have some older appliances, a PS5, a gaming PC and I work from home! My family members who live in single family houses use around 300-400 kWh per month. 30 per day is absurd!
i mean it depends on the weather, last month was about 10kwH per day, but i agree 30 means a big house in the summer with ac on when its over 100
We are a houshold of 4 people with everything (tumble dryer, dishwasher, two big freezers, a lot of tech and TVs and routers) and even we average at arount 6kWh per day. So yeah something is completely off here.
Maybe bad isolated houses with the ac on full?
Agree, 30 kWh per day sounds like A LOT! No wonder the world is going to hell if we're not even trying to reduce consumption...
Why can't you use lightning for electricity? I see you haven't gotten to Fulgora yet.
The factory must grow
Lightning. Gives off many types of energy!! Light, Heat and sound energy. You could capture that instantly in an electrolyte liquid. The rest of the heat could be recovered turned into steam. So you have heat and charged solution
5:25 is the power law. Not ohm's law.
You forgot to mention nuclear power when talking about viable strategies.
Viable but not renewable.
@@FlushGorgon yea not renewable but a massive step away from coal and oil, and hopefully a predecessor of fusion reactors which are technically not renewable but a universally abundant fuel.
What no. Mica is a dielectric and Ohm's law equals voltage, not power, to the current times the resistance. Dielectrics and insulators are not the same thing. Power and voltage are not interchangeable.
Hmm, 1000GW * 30microseconds is 30 megawattseconds, is it not? Am I missing something?
all of this forgets that what we see as lightning is actually the discharge of energy. from the moment that lighting starts being visible, it is the result of static electricity flowing through the air and exploding it on the way down (or up). As soon as energy starts doing anything either traveling or producing heat or light, it loses watts. The value of energy calculated from a lighting strike takes into account all the work it took to blow up the air on the way down. The best "lighting" collector would theoretically eliminate lighting altogether and would just scrape away the potential energy straight from the clouds. The depiction of how a capacitor works is perfect to describe what is happening in a storm. The clouds the ground beneath the clouds and the air between them make up the three components of the capacitor which means that when you see a lighting strike, it's just the charge shorting out. A theoretical perfect lighting generator would basically be a perpetual cloud that is constantly under turbulence which is only possible with gravity and different fluids (air and vapor) and some thermal dynamics thrown in. This starts to look a lot like a perpetual motion machine though.
Something I dreamed of at 18, but realized that the resistance involved in the capacitors would mean that the discharge would take a less resistive path in the first place, or would jump off somewhere along the path.
A more viable project is the continuous collection of the ground-air charge difference in those lightning-prone areas using helium-filled balloons and graphene-loaded cabling.
The high likelihood of these collectors being struck by lighting means that you could effectively harness lightning as a byproduct, by creating designated jump-off points in the cable and conducting that super-high charge through some process involving slightly less resistance than lightning would encounter traveling through air.
An example would be an expanded Zeldovich mechanism for generating nitrogen oxide as the charge passes from the jump-off conductor to an earth ground, through the air (or some other medium you want to process), inside an insulated container.
How about running that electrostatic energy to electrostatic motors, which could drive generators, which could charge a bank of batteries.
This was implied to on the “Plasma Channel”.
That was a well-explained answer to a question I actually had, nice!
0:38 I could be wrong, but I lived in Homestead, FL for a year, and boy howdy the thunderstorms there every day of summer in the afternoon all that moisture coming off the Everglades... so this looks very southern Florida to me. Also, I was thinking more like tethered balloons that constantly harvest the potential differential, not harvesting the strikes, that's silly.
Been waiting years for you guys to talk about Rayo del Catatumbo, I almost screamed out loud when el Lago de Maracaibo got mentioned 😭 As a Venezuelan who was born and raised in Maracaibo I grew up hearing the magnificence of this natural phenomenon and would love if you made an episode about it 🥺💛
They have talked about it in an episode before!! I can't remember which one, I'm afraid, but i definitely learnt about it from SciShow.
I THINK the video might be called something about "strange lakes"?
I've wondered about this since I was 12YO. THANK YOU!!
5:30 enough for a 826 time travels in a DeLorean
8 kw/h per lightning strike. The average EV battery is around 80 kw/h. An EV car would need to get hit 10 times to charge its batteries for 300 miles of driving, and real time travel, if possible, probably would need so much more energy than that.
Clever
Damn. 1000 Gigawatts is way overkill for that flux capacitor which only needs 1.21 JIGAWATTS!?!?! Great Scott!!
At 1:20 what do you mean "lightning strikes can be positive or negative"? Electrons are negatively charged so negative lightning makes sense, but what is positively charged lightning? A lightning strike of protons instead of electrons?
They mean directionality of current/electron flow, essentially.
**An excess of electrons** in the stormcloud would result in electrons traveling from the stormcloud to the ground.
**A lack of electrons** in the stormcloud would result in a lightning strike that pulls electrons from the ground to the stormcloud.
If you captured the first type in a battery, and then the next lightning strike were of the second type, it would just drain the battery of the electrons gathered in the first strike.
And even worse, unless you found some really clever way to completely isolate the charges you've already captured, a lightning strike of one type would just increase the chances of a lightning strike of the other type.
Put a big rod into the air to attract electrons and store them? Well ok, now you have a really big rod sticking into the air with an excess of electrons. And more electrons certainly won't want to jump in to that rod anymore. In fact, the excess of electrons in the rod will want to jump back into the stormcloud.
@cbirch7302 makes sense, if we hook up a lightning rod to a bunch of capacitors that can handle the load, and it gets struck. Now we have a lightning strikes worth of electricity in capacitors trying to discharge through our rod, so it will likely arc back up to the clouds or maybe just the ground.
Glad to finally have a video on this, even knew about the Venezuelan lightning hot-spot. Thought it was feasible for the last decade. Never considered the watt-hour factor. Yeh, you get a whole lot of VA, but for milliseconds. Thanks!
Love a shot of LA with snow-capped mountains in the background!
hmm, I wonder if there is a recent game release that has inspired this topic?
IT MUST GROW!
When I was a science teacher I had a student conduct a science fair project where they simulated lightning on small scale to vaporize water in a closed volume to create pressure to turn a turbine to convert it to mechanical energy… it worked.
Bummer! The lightning concept sounded So cool.
Thanks @SciShow I live in maracaibo and always wondered why not, and now I know 👍
We need a way to regulate lightning storms or discharges. I once saw a Professor experiment with directing the lightning to a specific spot by tying wire to a small rocket. It looked like a toy but, it worked consistently. The lightning followed the wired to a metal spike that he buried in the ground.
We need three strikes a day per home.
Thanks for answering a question that I had for decades...
You know the video is bad when literally all visible top comments are pointing out obvious elementary school mistakes considering TH-cam comments aren't exactly known for it's intellegence
The Voltage: Extremely high.
The Current: Very high.
The Power: Overwhelming
The timeframe: One nanosecond.
Really interesting topic, great explanation.
great video! really appreciated the insights shared. but honestly, i can't help but think that with all the tech advancements, we should be exploring lightning as a more viable energy source. it seems strange that we're not leveraging something so powerful and natural. what do you guys think?
According to my research, if your statement about lightning in LA and unicorns, there must be loads of unicorns in LA! There were approximately 1,200 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes over the nearly three decades between 1988 and 2017. That may not be many lightning strikes, it's a lot of unicorns tho!
The bottle capable of capturing lightning is called a Laden Jar
Leyden jar
Regardless of the errors, thanks for the topic.
Scishow got me asking questions I would’ve never asked myself.
Like, why DON’T we use lightning for electricity?
I think it's possible but we might not have the infrastructure to make it possible. The problem is why we try to harness it when it strikes when you can do it before it strikes or even prevent it.
Side Note: If we ever figure out super-capacitors, we could eventually make lightning stations not as their own sole form of power, but in conjunction with other forms. If lightning strikes a wind turbine or solar farm, it has the potential to be really bad. But if we could make lightning stations such as you described to be more like a super form of lightning rod that uses super capacitors to catch the power and use those capacitors to then charge up power storage like batteries to put energy into the grid at a more controlled pace, that might offer a form of protection for the solar/wind farms while adding some extra energy to the grid. We need synergistic solutions, not some mythical magic bullet power lol.
Idk, I just needed a few bricks, some steel and copper wire for this, granted, it didn't make much power, it was only like 23% efficient
Leaving Nauvis for this was worth it, had to grow the factory
I really appreciate you dumbing down the maths as much as possible for this!! If only this was actually possible and easier to do... sounds like if we could figure it out better, it might work in the future, especially if we're going to get more storms along with climate change...
Isnt there a high voltage at those altitudes mere hundreds of feet up? Imagine if we harvest this trickle amounts of power. Anything built to harvest this power is going to be something you build just once and then benefit from for the rest of the time its up there.
You can site them on top of wind turbines and radio towers in areas where lightening is very common
Even if it's not a reliable source on its own, the idea of turning lightningrods into extra sources of electricity still sounds very appealing to me.
We don't have to capture the entire spark into capacitors. We can catch a portion of the electromagnetic pulse emitted by the lightning, perhaps using parabolic dishes or other types or aerials, and dump the energy into a capacitor array.
Then the stored charge must be discharged into a heavy duty Capacitor inductor circuit where the electrical energy oscillates between a capacitor bank and an induction coil. Then we can tap off the oscillating field using transformer coils.
While doing all of this there will be loss of energy in form of heat. So I think at end it won't be efficient
This is so silly... they say it's Billions of joules at 04:44 as if that's a big number then they say it's actually just a few KWh and that that's a small number both of these are units of energy - so which is it? a lot of energy or not a a lot of energy?
Also because KWh and joules are measuring the same thing (quantity of energy) they are directly convertible - 1B joules = 277~KWh.
So logically it can't be both BILLIONS WITH A B Joules and 8kwh so which is it?
I'd say it a small thing but it seems like the whole point of the video, it's like your saying:
1. Lighting is cool and it's have a ton of energy
2. it's difficult to capture, but there are ways
3. It's actually not that great
I remember thinking this same thing when I was little. I was like “look! There’s so much electricity, why don’t we just use that stuff”
What might work is using the large-scale atmospheric electrical fields *behind* lightning as a source of power, since doing that is as easy as creating an artificial circuit to replace the natural circuit that lightning would otherwise create for itself - which is in turn as easy as just launching 2 cable-tethered balloons up into the air to 2 different altitudes (one tethered balloon to 40000ft and another to 5000ft, for example) and using a miles-long wire to connect them. That might in turn actually prevent the charges from building up enough to become lightning strikes to begin with because they'd have a continuous path to flow through that we created for them.
Wiring up a thunderstorm like this in a way that uses atmospheric charge separation as a source of power would also allow us to produce green hydrogen much less expensively, since, well, there's also a lot of water in those storm clouds that can be easily split by electrolysis. That hydrogen could then go on to fill gaps between storms by being pumped through grid-scale fuel cells.
If you do a basic unit conversion, you get about 280kWh energy per strike on average. Enough for a house 1-2 months. Not worth the hassle
Watt's Law, not Ohm's Law. P = V * I
1:47 - Wait... So Stardew Valley should really make Capacitor packs from Lightning Rods??
Wait an 0:41 you say that a lightning strike releases billions of joules, 1 billion joules is 277 Kilowatt hour, at 5:49 you say that a lightning releases 8 kilowatt hour. Those are pretty different numbers!
Electro-spun carbon nano-tube mats rolled onto glidcop. Highest thermal and electrical conductivity. Highest surface area, can trap and be bound to rare earths, can be made into highest energy density capacitors. Top shelf tech.
We clearly need a Stargate Atlantis Zero Point Module.
the title of the video is mildly misleading.
I thought that the video was going to say that utilizing lighting is practically impossible.
instead of that the video is about why we aren't utilizing lighting as whole as a renewable energy source.
Aw, that was a bummer ending. Still, sounds like it wouldn't be a bad support system, have one of them running in the background (in a place that gets lightning a lot) in addition to the main power generators yeah?
The idea is correct. The challenge is simply in building it. Think Franklin's kite. It didn't really need to get struck by lightning for it to collect charges from the air.
WHAT THE HELL IS A GIGA-WATT!?! - Marty McFly😂🥰👍
Bring back Hank to present the videos
"How cool lightening is . . . " That's a hot topic!😂
"Lightening strikes can be positive or negative, which means one can literally cancel out the other." Can someone clarify this point? I was under the impression that lightening/electricity was a discharge and flow of electrons which by definition are negatively charged. Not clear on the positive part.
5:42 1 Terawatt , (1,000,000,000,000 joules ) for 30 micro seconds is 30 Gigawatts 30,000,000,000 joules ) ( 30KWH is 108 Megajoules of energy) you could power 277 homes - also no home should ever be using 30 KWH a day .
The design, overall, is cool for the lightning rod and capacitors. Now, if it was possible to not rely on nature (open space) have that evaporation in a controlled environment (closed space) then it might be reasonable to get more then one strike a day. The next question could be to know how big the environment (wave guide) would have to be and how much climate control is required. Thanks for the video.
5:46 you lost the trail on magnitudes - 10 megavolts x 100 kiloamps is 10^7 volts x 10^5 amps, so 10^12 watts. A microsecond is one millionth (10^-6) of a second, so 30 microseconds is 30 x 10^-6, or 3 x 10^-5 seconds. So that's 3.33 x 10^6 watt seconds, or 3.33 megawatt seconds. However, you're still right that it's a negligible amount of power. To convert watt seconds to watt hours, you divide by 3600 (60 seconds x 60 minutes). 3.33 x 10^6 ÷ 3600 = 925 watt hours. You can a small space heater for an hour on one lightning strike. You could run an electric tea kettle for ~45 minutes.
Great Scott! 1.21 "Jiga" watts!
you just need to use enough accumulators like on fulgora
Lightning is what happens when energy is released. Using it to power anything is like trying to toast a s'more in the heat of a detonating hand grenade. We'd be better off tapping into the charge potential of the clouds before it builds enough to arc. Think of the clouds and ground like the charged plates in a capacitor, because that's essentially what they are.
It seems a more practical form of lightning power would be to have a tower that bleeds off charge from a storm than to try and use a strike directly
Perhaps a video on Nikola Tesla's "wireless electricity" is next?
One of my childhoods questions answered 😊
Building a 10MV capacitor which can store 30MWs would require something like 100 square meters of thick copper for each plate. The cost makes it prohibitive.
You need to build lit of antennas, like 2000 or more or more near to eachother above the ground like 15m. Ground it and you will get lightning
Lightning is always around us. Tame it with gravity and it can be directed.
Why not set up a city wide lightning rod array, have them all meet at a heat sink, and use the power to boil water, turn a turbine, and it basically becomes another regular power plant. It should at least work in Venezuela. If nothing else it would be cool as heck.
If we could collect all the lightnings hitting France in a year (including all the fields, forests and lakes), that would be enough to power the country for about 3 hours. If you use that electric energy to create heat to turn a turbine to create electricity, you may loose half of that power, in dissipated heat, reducing the yearly collect to 90 minutes of useful energy for the country.
Positive lightning isn't actually a positive charge... Which is whats being implied here. It's just a difference in what's causing the leader, the cloud or the ground.
Don't forget about the fact that the grid would literally explode. Also, power plants can't slow down or speed up that much.
Well, I kind of figured that capturing lightning for electricity would have some problems, or we'd already be doing it, even if only on a small scale. But I didn't realize the extent of those problems.
Let lightning strike a big resistor that charges a thermal heat sand battery. Fast charge and slow discharge.
Lightning super powers are always the sickest
if we could harness that true raw power of lightning bro we'd be sooooo locked in
"Slightly rarer than unicorns" is an amazing line
And I heard that a lightning could power a house for a month. Thanks for the video.
5:28 Just enough to power a Delorean's Flux Capacitor.
Duration would be my guess. Storing that power so quickly sounds like a ridiculous effort
Because lightning strikes on the same spot don't happen every day, and cloud seeding is not a guarantee to produce lightning, they figured the arithmetic and found out that it could take 120 years before you break even on the investment cost to build such a lightning power plant. Other sources of energy would be more economical.
8 kw/h per lightning strike. You'd only have to get hit by lightning in your car over 10 times a day to charge charge your EV, for it to drive 300 miles a day and that's assuming your lightning flux capacitor is 100% efficient.
!?wait what?!
how can you convert 30 wattseconds (per strike) to 8 kilowatthours (per strike)?
that doesn't make any sense at all
Yep that doesn't make sense! There is another name for the watt-second. It is called a Joule. Actually, the calculation gives 30 megawatts-seconds (or megaJoules) which is effectively about 8kWh. What happened to the billions of joules from the beginning of the video which are now reduced by two orders of magnitude, I have no idea at all...
From my calculation I got 108 kWh 😅