Thunderstorms

[crokett]

Too bad we can't use the energy from them, except for wind power. We had a storm come through here yesterday evening. The temperature dropped 20 degrees in about 15 minutes. All that heat energy had to go somewhere.

[jackellis]

All that heat energy had to go somewhere.

That temperature drop was probably cold air behind the front. The warm air eventually rises and finds its way back to the arctic.

[Garasaki]

Thats really an interesting idea. Many thunderstorms are the result of the increase in energy in the atmosphere (summer heating on a warm humid day pops off storms in the evening, once the source of energy is starting to fade). Well I'm not an expert by any means, but it would be interesting to analyze thunderstorm creation from a purely thermodynamic point of view (looking at the movement and distribution of energy).

I think there a lot of natural occurances that contain a tremendous amount of energy. Volcano's for instance.

Storms would be another one - think about the electrical energy present in a lightning strike...

or the kinetic energy required to move a mass of air thats several miles wide and several miles tall at 75 mph. The energy that must be released as water droplets condense into rain, and the potential energy that rain possesses (lol thats got to be too many s's) as it sits several miles above the surface of the earth.

[dbhost]

Who says we can't utilize storm energy? At least in theory it should be possible to somehow capture wind energy, energy from rainfall, and even potentially by intentionally attracting lightning strikes to some sort of collector. Not sure how that would work though, but I would think that eventually we would be able to figure the technology out...

[radhak]

I am confident some time in the future science would have advanced enough to tap into all of that energy, and tamed it. My biggest fantasy is when humankind would be able to bottle the largest energy source in our vicinity - the Sun.

That's an imagery that I just can't get rid of - a long (ok, loooong!) hose-pump dipping into the sun at one end and reaching all the way to earth with a faucet at the other end, providing all the energy anybody would want.

As for thunderstorms, I am not sure it's all that far fetched : we already have Wavepower , and there's already a functioning power-station in portugal on that!

But thunderstorms could be give more ROI : according to the wikipedia, "In an average thunderstorm, the energy released amounts to about 10,000,000 kilowatt-hours (3.6 × 1013 joule), which is equivalent to a 20-kiloton nuclear warhead" !
quick calc - I've heard that an average US household consumes 10,000 Kilowatts a year, so that's around a 1000 households from one average thunderstorm... !!!

And there are geeks working on it...

[Garasaki]

If I assume my electric bills are 125$ a month all year, and I pay 10 cents a kWh, then I must use about 15,000 kWh a year...

Our usage is probably higher then average due to my wife liking the AC so much.

[radhak]

ok, 999 regular households and John's till September !

we use very little AC, and pay around $90 a month.
(yeah, I know, in florida! but LOML has a little bit of arthritis and she can't stand airconditioning. what all we do for love !)

[Garasaki]

LOL my wife needs her own thunderstorm to satisfy her ridiculous AC usage!

I didn't mean to post that to challenge your figures of average use, but to confirm that it was in the neighborhood of being "right". I'm not sure it came across that way.

So thunderstorms could go a loooooong way to providing power for rural areas (which of course, by area, is most of the US), but it seems they would probably fall well short in heavily populated urban areas (which I imagine accounts for the vast majority of energy usage in the US). Well, that is, they couldn't be relied on to provide the ENTIRE power supply.

The figure they came up with, 10,000,000 kWh is pretty interesting. I would be interested to know how they got that...and what percentage different feature contribute to that...

[radhak]

I didn't mean to post that to challenge your figures of average use, but to confirm that it was in the neighborhood of being "right". I'm not sure it came across that way.

No probs, you did confirm it, and it did come across right. I was just being facetious.

I am always skeptical about numbers in the mainstream media. For all you know a statistician might have reported an average annual usage of 14,135 KW per household and a reporter would have thought 10,000 made easier copy!

As for the 10,000,000 kWh, that's an extrapolation from calculating for a condensation of a single drop of water, and estimating the number of drops in a thunderstorm... pretty accurate, that - give or take a billion drops !

[Garasaki]

Well that's only one of several sources of energy then, I think.

Dosen't even include lightning.

Add in wind, other sources of heat transfer, potential energy of rain, I'm sure there are other big ones too...

[jackellis]

My biggest fantasy is when humankind would be able to bottle the largest energy source in our vicinity - the Sun.

I forget the exact source and the exact statistic but enough energy from the sun strikes a small part of the desert southwest (12,000 square miles I think) each day to meet all of mankind's energy needs and then some. Great in theory, much more problematic in practice. There are conversion losses, storage losses and the fact that solar energy is a low quality, low density source. Enviros and NIMBYs will complain if you cover half of New Mexico with solar collectors. You need a place to store energy for overnight use and transmission lines to get it where it's needed since New Mexico isn't exactly a large population center. Large scale storage is expensive and in some cases, requires a lot of environmentally sensitive land.

IOW, it's all possible, but it's expensive and difficult.

[Garasaki]

IOW, it's all possible, but it's expensive and difficult.

...with current technology...

[Kristofor]

All of your thunderstom energy is derived from the sun directly or indirectly. As we've recently discussed in another thread under perfect conditions on the sunny side of the planet you could (with magic 100% efficient devices) harvest ~1400W/square meter.

10,000 kWh/yr * 1000Wh/kWh = 10,000,000 Wh/yr
10,000,000 Wh/yr / 365d/yr / 12sunny hours/day = 2283Watts needed during sunny hours
2283 W / 1400 W/m^2 = 1.63m^2 of perfect solar harvesting to power the "average" household.

That's far smaller than your roof. Unfortunately we can't capture anywhere near 100% efficiently and we do have clouds and so forth so you'd need 3-6 times as much collection area in the real world with today's technology, but it's getting close to reasonable...

[Garasaki]

All of your thunderstom energy is derived from the sun directly or indirectly.

A simple yet profound point...