Lightning is an incredible  display of nature’s power.

And as a source of energy, it’s  both free and basically limitless. So you’d think that’d spell a recipe for  renewable energy that is also, like, metal as heck.

Except that the phrase “to  catch lightning in a bottle” means to do something really  difficult for a reason. And in the end, even if we could manage  it, it might not even be worth doing. [♪ INTRO] Despite how cool lightning is, at a basic level, it’s not all that different from when  you shock your fingers on a doorknob. Water droplets and ice particles  in clouds knock each other around and throw off charged particles, creating  static electricity that builds and builds.

And suddenly… crack! There’s your lightning strike. That discharge releases a huge amount of energy.

A single lightning bolt can  contain billions of joules. Billions. With a “b.” For reference, there’s about 5,000  joules of energy in a triple A battery.

A lightning powered remote  would basically never die. So, break out the tools and start building  the lightning power stations, right? What are we waiting for?

Well, actually, there’s a problem. A few, actually. For one thing, you have to collect  the lightning in the first place.

So you’d have to put your power station somewhere that gets struck by lightning all the time. That’d be great in, say, stormy central Florida. But somewhere like Los Angeles, where  thunderstorms are slightly rarer than unicorns… well, you can see the issue.

You’d also have to deal  with variability of charge. Lightning strikes can be positive or negative, which means one can literally cancel out another. So you’d need a way to store both  without giving them a chance to do that.

And the whole power station would  have to be able to, you know, not blow up when it gets hit by lightning. But maybe the most important  problem has to do with the basic nature of lightning strikes:  All that energy happens all at once. That means that we either have to  immediately use up a billion joules, which we don’t slash can’t, or we  have to figure out how to store it.

While this could mean a battery, it’s  a lot more likely to mean a capacitor. The difference lies in the  ways these things store energy. A battery stores energy as chemical potential  energy – basically through chemical reactions.

Capacitors, on the other hand, hold  onto energy in pure electrical form. At their most basic, capacitors are two pieces of conducting material called  plates with an insulator in between. When a capacitor is charging,  one plate is grabbing electrons and one plate is losing electrons, creating  a charge difference between the two plates.

When it’s discharged, all the electrons  flow from one plate to the other until things equal out in there,  releasing all the stored energy. No chemical reaction necessary. In general, capacitors charge up way  faster, so they’re better for situations where you’re getting electrical  energy pumped in quickly.

Like getting hit by lightning. Plus, unlike batteries, capacitors can be  recharged over and over again without losing any oomph, which is critical if you’re  collecting lighting strikes over and over. If you’ve ever owned a cell phone, you  know a battery ain’t gonna last that long.

So there are a few challenges to  building our lightning power station. But it’s not like people haven’t  thought about ways to do it. One study in particular, published in 2022, actually lays out a way that some  scientists believe it could be done.

The overall layout of the  plant would be pretty simple: a lightning rod connected to two capacitors. The hardest part of the whole  thing is the capacitor itself. Designing something that can charge  that much that fast isn’t easy.

The researchers’ proposal calls for a capacitor that uses copper for the plates  and mica for the insulating guts. Copper because it would be  most stable in this situation, and mica for its top-tier insulating ability. It would have to be one big capacitor, but  theoretically, it could get the job done.

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But even if we could make that fancy lightning  power station, it might not be worth it. Because lightning isn’t energy in and of itself. It produces energy.

And not as much as you’d think. Let me explain. And bear with me, because  there’s going to be some math.

You can imagine a lightning bolt, a cloud, and  the ground as making up an electrical circuit. When you’re dealing with an electrical circuit,  you need to keep track of 3 main things. You have current, which you can think  of as the rate of electron flow.

You have voltage, which you can think of as the driving force pushing  electrons through a circuit. And you have power, which is how fast a system will use energy in the form of electricity. Each lightning bolt has a  current of about 100 kiloamps and a voltage of around 10 megavolts.

And luckily for us, there’s a  cool formula we can use here to get the one thing we’re missing: power. It comes from a famous law known as Ohm’s Law, and it’s, if you’ll pardon  my pun, shockingly easy. Power equals voltage times current.

Simple. Plug in the values, and each lightning  bolt nets us about 1000 gigawatts of power. But we still have to get to usable  energy, which is power times time.

And here is where it starts to fall apart. Each lightning bolt only  lasts about 30 microseconds, so all that power only nets you  about 30 watt-seconds of energy. Convert those units, and you get about 8  kilowatt-hours of energy per lightning strike.

And here’s the kicker. On average, one household uses about  30 kilowatt-hours of energy per day. We’d need around 3 lightning strikes  per day to power a single home.

And the most lighting-ey place on Earth  – which is Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela – has less than 1 strike per  square kilometer per day. As cool as lightning power sounds, it turns out  to be a whole lot more trouble than it’s worth. Things like solar, wind, and geothermal, though?

Now those are some viable sustainable strategies. Maybe a little less flashy, but they’ll do us a whole lot more  good moving towards a greener future. [♪ OUTRO]