Submitted by MistWeaver80 t3_10ef77j in science
So I guess the laser needs more than 1.21 jigawatts of power to work?
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We just need larger and wider inductors to increase and prolong the energy uptake.
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The problem with attempting to store lightning as energy is the bursty nature of it.
Collecting a bunch of energy over a day, or an hour, or whatever is fine.
Collecting a bunch of energy in less than a second is gonna absolutely destroy virtually all infrastructure we can currently make.
So while it's theoretically possible to do, in practice it's not something we're ready for.
Electricity and water don't mix, unless you are using water as an analogy. Then it works so well basically all the time.
The way I see it, you can fill a reservoir from lots of little streams, or even massive rivers. Sending 8.4 cubic miles of water (77.3 trillion pounds) at Hoover dam all at once (the reservoir's capacity), and it's gonna fail.
Something that requires 1.21 Gigawatts?
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Seems like that could make one hell of a weapon.
Directed lightning strikes? No chance of that being used for blowing stuff up!
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Use it to guide the lightning and charge batteries to power a city.
IIRC, a lightning strike does pack a punch but not that much
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That one poor Birb flying at the wrong place at the wrong time
The middle of a lightning storm?
This would've made things a lot easier for Doc Brown
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Clear a path for directed electrons?
Yes, we know from the 1,000 other recent posts about it.
sjiveru t1_j4tlhcw wrote
For those of you wondering (like I did), the amount of power required to fire a laser large enough to redirect lighting is much higher than the amount of power you could generate by taking advantage of the energy in that lightning. It's useful for moving lightning away from problem targets, but not useful for power generation.