Posted on 07/31/2025 9:46:10 AM PDT by fwdude
An enormous, 515-mile-long flash of lightning that crossed at least three states has been named the longest in recorded history in the world.
The 2017 “megaflash” stretched from eastern Texas to near Kansas City — a distance that would take at least eight hours by car or 90 minutes by commercial plane, according to the World Meteorological Organization. In comparison, the average bolt of lightning usually measures less than 10 miles, according to the National Weather Service.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Is there a way to harness lightning for power? How many kilowatts or megawatts would be harnessed from a single strike? And could it be easily stored in lithium batteries?
1.21 Jigga watts last I heard.....................🙄
That's been my question for quite a while.
I'd also like to see a compost generator produce stored energy. Sustained temps of 160°-180° F has to be worth something.
I think taking high voltage, high current that would need to transfer in less than a second exceeds anything we’re remotely capable of.
Secondarily, while we think a bolt of lightening has insane amounts of energy, I’ve heard it can only power a very medium sized city for about 1 minute. Which is still a lot. But kind of puts it in persepective of just how many (completely unpredictable) bolts of lightening you’d need to capture to have any kind of efficency.
Not practically. The amount of power -- volts times amperes -- is enormous, beyond any technology we have to capture and store electricity. We can play with a tiny fraction of it (like Franklin did), but not with the amount of a real lightning bolt.
It's sort of like asking, "I don't want to waste my time eating regular-sized meals the rest of my life. Is there a way that I can just get all the food I'll eat for the next 30 years and eat it all at once?"
NO, your stomach can't hold it.
Yep, by many orders of magnitude.
Also see #7 above.
That one really could have taken someone back to the future, again...
It went right over my house. I remember it well.
The idea would be to make them predicable - create the circumstances that make a lighting bolt, and then capture it in a bottle when it sparks.
“We can play with a tiny fraction of it (like Franklin did)...”
Oddly, I just read an account of what Franklin did. He had a metal wire hanging off his kite and it picked up electricity, not a lightning bolt, from the storm clouds. His string conducted electricity when wet. He took precautions not to get electrocuted — used silk cloth wrapped arouond his hand for insulators and stood under a shelter.
Franklin is regarded as a polymath — a person who has tremendous learning in varied fields.
A guy in France used a metal rod and was electrocuted.
Groks says the flash lasted almost eight seconds!
I've known two people who have been struck by lightning. One was a boy in our Boy Scout troop and the other was woman who has been hit twice by lightning. They both told me it really hurts.
Sure, get a kite, hang a key off of it and connect it to a solar panal and a wind turbine.
Everything’s bigger in TEXAS!
Good post wonder how many TV’s gave up their life on that amped up deal.
Wow, you make up for the zero people I’ve known hit by lightning.
I was camping with a girlfriend in the Wind River Mountains many decades ago. We were on a bald rock outcrop watching the lighting hit the bare mountain rock across the lake. I kept waiting for the tingling sensation and hair standing up on end, but it neve happened. But I’ve never been more afraid of getting struck than that day.
I wonder what it is near KC that would generate such a charge...
[tin hat off]
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