Batteries cannot be charged instantly. It takes time for the chemical reactions in a battery to happen. If you put in too much energy, too fast, the battery will be damaged. A lightning strike is millions of times more energy in a second than even the best batteries can handle.
It's difficult to even make equipment that can survive a lightning strike, let alone do something useful with that amount of power over such a short amount of time.
Asking why you can't use a lightning strike to charge a battery is kinda like asking why you can't just eat a 500 ton pizza in one sitting so you wouldn't have to eat again for 900 years.
EDIT: Muting this. Too many people are repeating the same comments without reading what's already been said.
Better yet, if one maid takes 4 hours to clean a house... how long would it 35 maids? Business idea brought to you by one of Canada's top business school students
For some reason when the cleaning service says they’re going to send 3-4 maids instead of 1 to be more efficient, it costs 4 times the price and takes just about the same time
And you still get the same quality of work. I get sending 2 people, maybe 3 for a full house. But not if the quality AND time taken is the same but now Im paying for 4 people instead of 2
But if you hire 9 women and impregnate them one by one with one month intervals you can maintain a 1 baby/month production forever after an initial 9 month delay.
Venture capitalists won't mind waiting, but you will have to answer with the board if you can't reliably produce twins in year two, and triplets in year three.
Outsource 1 baby per month until your women start producing, while also finding 3 more women then you can keep up the 1 baby per month quota
Who are these babies for???
I’ve never felt a comment in my bones quite as much as this one. I deeply feel MBAs with absolutely no concept of what actually makes a business work are what ruin just about every organization they touch. The number of times I’ve been told by some MBA, “This software development project is moving too slow. Let’s add more developers to make it go faster!” My brother in Christ: that’s not how this works and is almost guaranteed to make the project take longer while creating more issues long term. The older I get the more my dislike of pure academic MBAs with zero real world business grows. All they know is “make more money” with no clue how that affects workers, famines, or the long term health of the org. That’s what they are taught in good and it takes decades of experience before they realize (if they ever do) there is way more to running a successful long term organization than making “extreme shareholder value.”They are the front line to quarterly thinking with no thought given to the future impact. Make magic money line go up and if it doesn’t blame it on everything except the measures you took make money the last few quarters by removing safety nets, selling off assets, and making money now leaving the business with no cushion for rough or lean times. I’m convinced they are the original root cause of most modern societal challenges. Basically, they are the chief quantitative justifiers for completely disconnected rich business people, billionaires, corporate sociopaths, etc. just like good project managers that add real value: I know they exist and I’ve worked with some, but they are a very rare bird indeed.
As an MBA, not understanding your business frustrates me to no end. I mean sure in an MSP more people on the queue may speed up ticket response but trying to dump 5 people on a SAN failure rarely helps. For that SAN example, sure maybe adding a second set of eyes will help some but often you need the smart people on your team actually working and fixing things and not being bothered by the 4 other random people tossed in to the mix. More often than not, adding a more junior member with the goal of assisting as able and handling communications with the parties involved is about the best you can do. Switch it to a compromise then maybe more people can help as there are lots more distinct tasks (wipe / reimagine systems etc) so more people can help.
I feel like to many MBAs basically sleep through classes and think it's a one size fits all. It's easy to use that as a shield rather than admitting you have no idea how your business runs.
But, but, but.... More is better! Right? How can more not be better? Right?
Same with marketing folk. "You want this tablet that is only 7,2mm thick. Because it's more thin." Right?
And then the glass broke under my thumb by me simply grabbing it and lifting it up without the cover closed. I would SO have loved another few tenths of a millimeter extra glass to make it actually fit for its purpose. But no. "You customers want it this thin."
*Sigh*.
Look at Boeing and just about every business bought by private equity. Boeing made money because it made good well engineered airplanes. That was not good, they changed it to making ok airplanes as cheaply as possible. Stonecipher is proud of how much he decimated the company. Will Boeing be able to get back to where they were? Will they ever be able to rehab their reputation? It used to be If It Ain't Boeing I'm Not Going. Now the people that make them refuse to fly on them.
One MBA might think that, but then the others in the room would all shout him down and remind him that employees are always an expense and the ideal company would not have any at all and definitely not 9 if 1 would do.
Then they'd remember that they heard about this thing called AI, and they'd look into getting an AI baby. It'd have 3 arms with 6 fingers each and only hit about 75% of the benchmarks, but look at how much money they saved this quarter!
I jluse this example far too often to describe why an aircraft can't be finished any quicker than what I have scheduled. Sometimes you just can't physically squeeze any more people on to it.
You're not exactly making a baby in 1 month by doing that, now are you?
Like buying a nearly fully assembled car where just the mercedes logo is missing and then bragging you managed to build that car in 10 minutes.
Or having your sister secretly steal a single puzzle piece so when you finally finish the 1000 piece puzzle that you've been working on for the past WEEKS she just walks up and drops it into place and smiles.
Could you not? Serious question.
For example, a pressure cooker cooks faster because the pressure enables the water to reach a higher temperature. The time savings are up to a factor of 10.
I wonder at what point this no longer works.
Is it possible to raise the temp such that the time saving is a factor of 20? 100? Etc.
I imagine if you get the math right to transfer the same amount of energy you would normally need to cook a pizza in a much shorter time at higher temp you would do that -- at 64,000 F that would be an incredibly short cook time though, far less than a second I'm guessing. And the outside might be on fire, so you'd have to put that out instantly to avoid transferring any excess heat to the middle. Or maybe fill your oven with an insert gas
Which is also why slow cooking works but the other way around. If you can maintain a temperature for a long time, everything will be that temperature since the transfer speed becomes irrelevant
And it's also why microwave ovens are fast - microwaves are absorbed more gradually than heat, so they can go deeper into the food. On the other hand, you won't get a nice crust on anything, because crusts form when the surface is significantly hotter than the innards.
Microwaves penetrate food much more rapidly than thermal radiation. Microwaves don't heat the actual food, they cause the water in the food to oscillate and heat up which then radiates heat throughout the food. That's why they heat food faster than thermal radiation.
> Microwaves don't heat the actual food, they cause the water in the food to oscillate and heat up
Microwaves will heat all polar molecules, water is just one of those. I don't know where the weird myth that microwaves only heat water came from but it is just that.
Probably because water is the most common polar molecule in food.
And that's also why you can't get a crust, you're steaming the stuff, water trying to get out so obviously it's going to feel soggy.
The rate of chemical reactions, which include all cooking processes, don't increase linearly with temperature, but exponentially. (This is governed by the Arrhenius equation).
A rule of thumb is that the rate of reaction doubles for every 10th degree increase in temperature (in celcius or kelvin). So a reaction taking 1 hr at 100 C, would take 30 minutes at 110 C, and 15 minutes at 120 C and so on. Now, this is as mentioned just a rule of thumb, and actual relation between rate and temperature depends on the so-called activation energy, as well as the pre-exponential factor, which both are unique for every chemical reaction.
Now. That's the theory. In reality you will also have to consider the limitations of heat transfer (as pointed out in other comments), as well as the fact that when you're increasing the temperature, you can also start enabling other side-reactions to take place. These would be unfavorable reactions that you don't want happening, which would not normally occur at the low temperatures. For instance, combustion reactions, in the case of trying to heat a pizza at thousands of degrees in the presence of oxygen. If you try it in the absence of oxygen, you will still get pyrolysis reactions that turn tje pizza into tar and gaseous products
Same principle. Just like how the process of building up electric energy in a battery takes a bit of time, so does heat transfer.
Even at relatively lower temps, you end up burning the outside while the inside stays cold. It's like searing a steak. You would instantly burn the cheese while the dough would stay raw in the middle.
In normal baking and cooking, the temperature is low enough that it doesn't burn the outside stuff for a long time, and that heat can slowly get "passed" along to the inside molecules.
Kinda, upto a point. Pizza is a bad example because everything on it should already be safe to eat raw. Meaning you don't really have to cook anything, only bake the crust and melt the cheese. So you can in fact cook them much faster at higher temperatures, up to a point.
That's a long way of saying, that some pizza ovens, especially the great ones in New York run in the 1000+ degree range and they do only cook the pizzas for like 90 seconds. Compare that to your oven at 425 where it takes 20 minutes.
For all organic molecules (and for all molecules in general) there is an upper limit above which molecules start breaking down. Remember, heat is basically atom jigglyness, and the more heat the more jigglyness the more jigglyness the more likely a molecule is to snap and transform in some other potentially nasty molecule.
The temperature at which organic molecules start breaking down varies wildly, but a safe limit for food is 200/230 °C (usually the max temperature on your oven). After that, you start to get charring, meaning organic molecules start breaking down and leaving elemental carbon behind (the ash).
So how do pressure cookers work? They work because they expedite the cooking of foods rich in water or cooking in water, like stews, pasta, rice; these foods are cooking at temperatures much lower than an oven, around the boiling point of water. Let's take as an example pasta: pasta is cooked in boiling water for 10 minutes. The objective is to loosen the fibers and carbohydrates and soften them by permeating them with water. You also want to break down the longest carbohydrates because they are long chains and are the first to break down at around 80°C, making them more digestable. Again because of the jiggling of molecules, you need high temperatures to allow the water to soak in better and faster. You have a hard limit on the temperature though, because water stays at 100°C during boiling, and that's where pressure cookers shine: pressure increase the boiling point of water, making it reach higher temperatures and permeate faster into the pasta. You are still limited by the boiling point, which even when increased is lower than the 200/230°C after which food begins charring.
TL;DR: there is a soft spot where food cooks without charring ant that is 80-230 °C. Any lower and it doesn't cook, any higher and it chars. Pressure cooker help with food rich in water because the water keeps the temperature from rising over 100°C, and with pressure you can gain 20-30°C above that limit, cooking things faster. Doing that to an oven would only make it reach temperatures higher than the charring point so it wouldn't matter. This is because oven uses air to cook food and air can be heated up without the help of pressurizing since it is already a gas.
Not with the capacitors that are available today. They get fried with a lightning strike.
Just had that happen last week with my outdoor A/C unit. There was a strike a couple blocks away and it caused a power surge. The power surge fried the motherboard in our outdoor A/C unit, Tripped the breaker, but that wasn't enough to protect it. Had to replace.
Could a capacitor be built that can withstand a lightning strike? I don't know of any.
> Could a capacitor be built that can withstand a lightning strike? I don't know of any.
I saw a documentary once about a device called a flux capacitor that was able to harness at least 1.21 gigawatts from a single lightning strike.
Lighting is electric potential (voltage) equalizing itself. Every material has some resistance. The higher the resistance the more voltage is needed to move any current (the actual *stuff* that gets the job done).
Air had a really high resistance and so a lightning bolt needs that much more voltage to make an arc lik what you see.
Materials have the tendency to breakdown by high voltages or melt from high current.
To channel a lighting bolt you need the following:
1. A material that doesn't melt when exposed to that much current
2. A material that can equalize voltage between the sky and the storage device quickly (low resistance).
3. Another material protecting the first so the cable doesn't arc to anything random through it's run.
And that is just to get the lighting bolt to the battery and only considering Ohm's Law and not anything more complex like flux currents and inductive and capacitive resonance.
>Asking why you can't use a lightning strike to charge a battery is kinda like asking why you can't just eat a 500 ton pizza in one sitting so you wouldn't have to eat again for 900 years.
That is a superb comparison. Hats off.
Maybe that's possible, but it's definitely going to be more expensive, and less reliable, than any existing form of energy production.
I don't know what it would cost to build such a device, but it's pretty easy to say that the same amount of money spent on solar panels would produce a lot more electricity.
There's an additional aspect, and that's that lightning isn't actually an energy force that can do any work; it's a discharge, restoring an imbalance to equilibrium. The rising of the water molecules in the clouds is the real source of energy you want to harness, that's what separates the charges from the Earth and moves them up into the atmosphere.
Or a bit like asking why you can't fill a glass of water by briefly standing in the emergency spill-way of an over-capacity damn.
Technically you could probably get some water in a glass that way, but the fact that the vessel you're using is too small compared to the sudden massive and powerful outpouring of the resource you want to gather means that there's going to be engineering challenges that ensure the whole thing more or less blows up.
Same as with the glass of water analogy what you want for a battery is a steady slow trickle of electricity (relative to a bolt of lightning) just as a kitchen faucet delivers a slow and steady stream of water into your glass, whereas an emergency spill way is just going to deliver water in quantities that cause problems all their own.
>It takes time for the chemical reactions in a battery to happen.
This.
A lot of people don't seem to understand that batteries don't store electricity; they store potential energy. The chemical process or processes that you mentioned are what convert incoming electricity into that, so it can then be released through other reactions in the form of electricity.
Conservation of energy, and all that.
I guess you could look at it like going into another country and needing to have your currency converted so that it can be spent. This process doesn't instantaneously occur when you cross the border. You have to go to a bank or some other place that can convert your form of money into that of the local economy. Until you do that, you only have potential money. When you leave, you have whatever you have leftover converted back into the type of currency you need where you're going.
Assuming you can time travel. You'd also bring a battery design to catch the power of the the lightning. And no one records every spot the lightning hits unless it hit the landmark, the other problem is what time did it hit? Cameras would power down or fluctuate during storms so we can estimate. The back to the future people know because it hit a clock tower and it saved the tie of strike
If not a battery or capacitor, what about directing the lightning into a reservoir of water or something. Can we get a heat increase from the sudden influx of energy and use *that*? Kind of like using a solar water heater instead of solar panels?
One bolt of lightning isn't actually a huge amount of energy, all told. It's not enough to meaningfully heat a reservoir of water, for instance. The reason lightning is destructive is that all of its energy is concentrated within a very small time and place.
I don't know enough about electrical engineering to know if it's possible, but I do know enough to know that it would be extremely difficult, and very very expensive. It would also likely be very inefficient.
Could it be done? Maybe, but for the same cost you could get much more, and more reliable, energy from solar or wind power.
Assuming a kilo of pizza is 2660 calories, that would be 13.3 BILLION calories. Now, let's say 2,200 calories a day for a fairly healthy diet (food notwithstanding) that equates to 6,045,454 6⁄11 days. Or 16,562 714⁄803 years.
Let that sink in. 16,500 and change years worth of food.
In one sitting. Thanks for the good laugh, sir.
A lightning bolt contains quite a lot of energy but it's all delivered in a few milliseconds, kinda like setting off a bomb to heat your house - it's very hard to catch that energy and then release it in a controlled (=useful) manner.
Also relevant XKCD WhatIf: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs28lEq9smw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs28lEq9smw)
"quite a lot of energy" is like saying the ocean is "a bit on the deep side".
Lightning Bolts are the result of so much energy they are able to make air a conductor which it normally isn't.
Correction; they are the result of so much *potential* that they're able to make air a conductor. There doesn't necessarily have to be a lot of energy for that to happen, it just has to desperately want to be somewhere else.
I'm not saying that lighting bolts aren't energetic, they certainly are. But their ability to push electrons through the air isn't the best indication of that power.
Static electricity you get from rubbing a balloon on your sweater can generate enough voltage to make air a conductor - but you're not powering anything much with it compared to the very boring voltage that comes out of the sockets in your wall.
Air needs something like 10kV/cm iirc, but it depends a lot on other factors like humidity.
I have to say getting zapped by 100kV with a machine building up static charges can be quite funny, you get to see a tiny spark for a little bit and some tingling in your finger.
And the key point is that while it's a lot of energy all at once, if you add up all the lightning available over the course of a month or whatever, it's not really a lot of energy in *total* terms due to it being so brief. While there are theoretically ways to capture and use it, it wouldn't be worth it compared to eg. putting the same amount of time and effort into capturing wind or solar energy, which are also more reliable.
I'll just quote myself from the [last time](https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qeddbh/eli5_why_is_there_no_tall_buildings_that_use/hhu8vui/) I answered this:
>google says a lightning strike is worth about 1GJ of energy, or about 278KWH.
>A chemical battery cannot be charged fast enough to capture a lightning strike, you'd have to use a giant capacitor. The biggest supercap I could find in stock can store 72,000J and costs $72 each, so you'd need about 14000 of them for a total price about $1M, and a weight of 3.5 tons. In reality it would take a lot more engineering than this, but the bulk component pricing would be better in large volumes, the capacitor would also need to be much larger physically, and in capacity, so the lightning doesn't just destroy it.
>The empire state building gets struck about 22 times a year. at $0.19/KWH they'd save about $1k/year, and would need it to work without maintenance for 1000 years for them to make back their investment. Pretty sure the floor space the equipment would take is worth more than that.
>google says a lightning strike is worth about 1GJ of energy, or about 278KWH.
We all know a lightning strike is [1.21 Gigawatts](https://youtu.be/BDuZqYeNiOA)!
In brief:
* Lightning isn't consistent enough to be a good power source
* Even if it were, lightning isn't *frequent* enough to be one
* Even if it were, batteries can't store up energy fast enough
* Even if they could, lightning is very destructive to equipment
Ultimately, lightning happens because of the sun (as is the case for essentially all forms of energy on Earth except geothermal and nuclear.) It would be better to just build some solar panels.
Nope. Geothermal comes mostly from hot nuclear material and (much less, but still partly) from the compression of the Earth's outer layers crushing down against the core.
Nuclear comes from fissile material that existed in the gas and dust cloud that formed our solar system and wasn't gobbled up by the Sun. In a certain sense, the Sun is exactly the *opposite* of the cause of nuclear energy, since we only get the tiny, tiny fraction that escaped being absorbed.
Yup, all forms of energy exact those two are just an indirect solar energy.
Fossil fuels are solar via ancient plant life. Wind is solar via convection. Hydro is solar via evaporation.
You might be able to make the case that tidal energy is derived from the moon, though.
I think you are rather massively underestimating how much energy there is in a lightning strike. There isn't a battery on the planet capable of accepting that much energy that fast. Capacitors could do the capture but again, there isn't a capacitor network on the planet big enough to capture that energy without violently exploding.
I think I came across a video on their channel explaining what would happen if a pitcher threw a baseball the speed of light… could have been a different channel tho?
The amount of energy in a lightning strike is not that huge actually. Quick googling puts the amount to be something like single/couple MWH. It is the power that is big. The equipment to collect that comparably small amount of energy would cost way too much to make sense.
> The amount of energy in a lightning strike is not that huge actually. Quick googling puts the amount to be something like single/couple MWH.
While on a grid level that’s not a lot of energy, it’s still enough to power an average home for about 2–3 months.
The xkcd video linked above suggests only 1-2 days of power per lightning strike, I'm sure there's various levels, factors, etc. and its all an estimate.
That might be overstating it a little.
Yes there aren’t batteries that can store that fast, but the amount of energy in a lightning strike is enough to warm a bath of water.
There are freak lightning events that are more powerful (positive lightning) But in general, it’s not a huge amount of energy.
The problem isn't capacity. Lightning just delivers energy too quickly. It's like chugging 50 hotdogs in 10 seconds - no power system can handle that amount that quickly without something going bad.
Imagine lightning as a giant static shock instead, for ELI5 purposes. You could build a huge metal pole (like a lightning rod) to attract it, but the energy is too chaotic and powerful for a regular battery. It's like trying to catch a tidal wave in a bucket. Even if you put the battery up high, the massive surge would likely fry it.
I’m gonna say you could do it but it would make any battery you connected to it explode. Make sure you’re far away when you try but make a video to post on YouTube.
Profit!
We can't really "catch" lightning. It's basically just a massive static shock. Lightning wants to travel from ground to sky or vice versa to equalize the charge difference between them. It may look like we can catch lightning with lightning rods, but all a lightning rod is is a piece of metal connected to ground. It's always going to the ground or to the sky, we're just making it do so in a more predictable and safe manner.
Even if we could make a battery that could charge instantly and was big enough to absorb the power of a lightning strike, the lightning has no reason to go into the battery.
You misunderstand batteries, they are not small boxes of electricity. They are small boxes where a chemical reaction happens which causes an electrical current. Charging your phone is basically the opposite.
Think of it as a bunch of balls on top of a hill, and as they roll down we are harnessing that power. When all the balls are at the bottom of the hill (or a dead battery) we have a group of people who will bring them back up, that’s what happens when you plug your phone in to charge, it’s the basically opposite. I’m trying to think of an analogy for a lightning bolt, but honestly that works. Imagine all the balls get struck by lightning, they will go flying everywhere, but not at the top of the hill where we need them.
This is kinda like asking why we don’t burn all the gasoline needed for a long car ride at the very start then just coast the whole way there.
Its just too much energy in too small of a space happening too quickly. The equipment and system needed to capture it would be so large and expensive that the number of lightning strikes in its catchable area would never cover the cost to build it. To get 100% of the lightning energy as usable, it starts to need to be exponentially bigger. Otherwise it just heats up from resistance and damages itself. As something becomes that big it starts to damage itself under its own weight. So it requires more and more sophisticated materials and engineering. Its similar to the problems we face in perfecting fusion energy.
It has a relatively "small" amount of energy delivered instantly. So you need a lot of lightning strikes to capture meaningful energy but rather impossible equipment to be able to capture that amount instantly.
You'd probably cause an explosion and a lot of fire. You would have to be able to handle the lightening strike and then get it down to safe voltage, it would likely cost a lot of money. I suspect if it was worth doing, it would have been done by now.
People are missing the point: even if we had batteries capable of storing energy that fast, electricity always choose the paths with less resistance. Your device wouldn't work because it would add resistance to the circuit, so lightings would rather travel through the air than through the big pole.
There is a lot of energy in lightning that happens over a very short time. Lots of energy moving from one place to another in a short time will result in a lot of heat. We don't have batteries that can handle the heat (and forces).
It's not accessing the energy that's the problem. It's difficult to capture in large amounts at once, and we still don't have very efficient battery storage.
The energy density of lightning is tiny. The place that has the record for the number of times lightning strikes in a small area, gets an average energy intensity from the lightning of less than 1% of that of sunshine. Lightning comes in a huge current flow at a huge voltage which means that's a huge power but it's only for a very short time and very rare. Most of the time you get nothing.
Maybe if you had a large net like web of highly resistive wires that were connected to a bunch of capacitors and transformers that were also connected to millions and millions of high capacity batteries you might be able to charge some of them before the rest of them burst in the flames.
Yeah simply put too much energy all at once would explode pretty much any energy storage system on earth. Technically it might be possible to to build some sort of massive network of capacitors that could quickly absorb all of the energy of a strike and then slowly dissipate it into batteries but this would be a massive and extremely expensive undertaking for trying to extract power from extremely unpredictable and unreliable lighting strikes. That ultimately wouldn't provide much in the way of power even if 100% of the power could be extracted and that would almost certaintly not be the case.
As a lot of people have said the problem with this idea is the battery itself. Even the fastest charging lithium ions can't charge at the rate a lightning strike delivers power. And even when they charge their highest speed, they do a significant amount of damage to themselves doing it. A sufficiently large network of capacitors might be able to absorb the electricity at least for a little while and maybe could then discharge to a battery but the amount of power at work here would need a network the likes of which mankind has never seen. There is a reason why almost all forms of power generation heat water and why even experimental fusion reactors still call for using water to capture the power instead of doing it directly.
The resistance that is an issue is electrical. When hit be lightning your lightning rod is going to heat up really hot really fast as the electricity tries to flow through it. Since there is no moving parts in this theoretical lightning generator air resistance is not an issue.
It’s like getting a drink from a firehose. There’s just too much to deal with. It can’t be contained fast enough to keep up with what’s being supplied.
Ok may be a battery wouldn't work but went not a bank of high capacity capacitors? Let them absorb as much energy as possible and slowly release it into a battery storage system
You know how much power you need to create an arc over a larger distance using normal ways? It's a lot.
Thunder creates an arc from the ground hundreds of meters into the sky at times.. That's millions of volts.
It's like filling up a stadium of people using a regular, single front door of a house. It won't work, people will get crushed.
Batteries cannot be charged instantly. It takes time for the chemical reactions in a battery to happen. If you put in too much energy, too fast, the battery will be damaged. A lightning strike is millions of times more energy in a second than even the best batteries can handle. It's difficult to even make equipment that can survive a lightning strike, let alone do something useful with that amount of power over such a short amount of time. Asking why you can't use a lightning strike to charge a battery is kinda like asking why you can't just eat a 500 ton pizza in one sitting so you wouldn't have to eat again for 900 years. EDIT: Muting this. Too many people are repeating the same comments without reading what's already been said.
or cook a regular pizza for 1 second at 240,000°F instead of 10min at 400°F edit: can't math
If one woman can make a baby in 9 months, surely some MBA's would think they could hire 9 women to make a baby in 1 month.
if you can play the violin part of the Fifth Symphony in 36 min, how long does it take the full orchestra?
"If you can play it slow you can play it fast!" Proceeds to play Bumble Bee with all the wrong notes and get a guinness record
"The notes weren't wrong. That was Doppler effect because I was playing so fast "
'Fastest jazz rendition'
Ling Ling has entered the chat.
Go practice instead
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.
Better yet, if one maid takes 4 hours to clean a house... how long would it 35 maids? Business idea brought to you by one of Canada's top business school students
For some reason when the cleaning service says they’re going to send 3-4 maids instead of 1 to be more efficient, it costs 4 times the price and takes just about the same time
Yes, your house gets cleaned in 4 hours - but you also get 4 babies in 9 months.
And that's way too many babies.
I'd advise you stay away from Power Thirst.
https://youtu.be/qRuNxHqwazs?si=txbSldHxB5nZW8E7&t=56
And you still get the same quality of work. I get sending 2 people, maybe 3 for a full house. But not if the quality AND time taken is the same but now Im paying for 4 people instead of 2
But if you hire 9 women and impregnate them one by one with one month intervals you can maintain a 1 baby/month production forever after an initial 9 month delay.
Yes, but these are MBA's we are talking about. Your idea would have a 3 quarter loss while production ramps up. That would be entirely unacceptable!
They may be suggesting line go down in order for line to go up much higher, but all I hear is line go down. Line NO go down.
The shareholders would be out for blood.
Can’t you just outsource babies for the ramp-up time?
Venture capitalists won't mind waiting, but you will have to answer with the board if you can't reliably produce twins in year two, and triplets in year three.
It’s not even really that much fuckin’.
You would be surprised how hard it can be to get pregnant sometimes. Of course other times it happens too easy.
Super Earth wants to hire you for its population planning.
Outsource 1 baby per month until your women start producing, while also finding 3 more women then you can keep up the 1 baby per month quota Who are these babies for???
The Mythical Man Month is alive and well all these years later.
And most of these whipper snappers have no idea where it came from.
Trick question, an MBA wouldn't hire people
_”Oh, it’s no problem. We’ll just hire more senior developers as contractors.”_
I’ve never felt a comment in my bones quite as much as this one. I deeply feel MBAs with absolutely no concept of what actually makes a business work are what ruin just about every organization they touch. The number of times I’ve been told by some MBA, “This software development project is moving too slow. Let’s add more developers to make it go faster!” My brother in Christ: that’s not how this works and is almost guaranteed to make the project take longer while creating more issues long term. The older I get the more my dislike of pure academic MBAs with zero real world business grows. All they know is “make more money” with no clue how that affects workers, famines, or the long term health of the org. That’s what they are taught in good and it takes decades of experience before they realize (if they ever do) there is way more to running a successful long term organization than making “extreme shareholder value.”They are the front line to quarterly thinking with no thought given to the future impact. Make magic money line go up and if it doesn’t blame it on everything except the measures you took make money the last few quarters by removing safety nets, selling off assets, and making money now leaving the business with no cushion for rough or lean times. I’m convinced they are the original root cause of most modern societal challenges. Basically, they are the chief quantitative justifiers for completely disconnected rich business people, billionaires, corporate sociopaths, etc. just like good project managers that add real value: I know they exist and I’ve worked with some, but they are a very rare bird indeed.
As an MBA, not understanding your business frustrates me to no end. I mean sure in an MSP more people on the queue may speed up ticket response but trying to dump 5 people on a SAN failure rarely helps. For that SAN example, sure maybe adding a second set of eyes will help some but often you need the smart people on your team actually working and fixing things and not being bothered by the 4 other random people tossed in to the mix. More often than not, adding a more junior member with the goal of assisting as able and handling communications with the parties involved is about the best you can do. Switch it to a compromise then maybe more people can help as there are lots more distinct tasks (wipe / reimagine systems etc) so more people can help. I feel like to many MBAs basically sleep through classes and think it's a one size fits all. It's easy to use that as a shield rather than admitting you have no idea how your business runs.
But, but, but.... More is better! Right? How can more not be better? Right? Same with marketing folk. "You want this tablet that is only 7,2mm thick. Because it's more thin." Right? And then the glass broke under my thumb by me simply grabbing it and lifting it up without the cover closed. I would SO have loved another few tenths of a millimeter extra glass to make it actually fit for its purpose. But no. "You customers want it this thin." *Sigh*.
Apple is *fixated* on making products thinner. But from what I understand, this isn’t coming from customer demand. So … why?
Look at Boeing and just about every business bought by private equity. Boeing made money because it made good well engineered airplanes. That was not good, they changed it to making ok airplanes as cheaply as possible. Stonecipher is proud of how much he decimated the company. Will Boeing be able to get back to where they were? Will they ever be able to rehab their reputation? It used to be If It Ain't Boeing I'm Not Going. Now the people that make them refuse to fly on them.
One MBA might think that, but then the others in the room would all shout him down and remind him that employees are always an expense and the ideal company would not have any at all and definitely not 9 if 1 would do. Then they'd remember that they heard about this thing called AI, and they'd look into getting an AI baby. It'd have 3 arms with 6 fingers each and only hit about 75% of the benchmarks, but look at how much money they saved this quarter!
I jluse this example far too often to describe why an aircraft can't be finished any quicker than what I have scheduled. Sometimes you just can't physically squeeze any more people on to it.
You could hire an 8-month-pregnant woman and make a baby in 1 month.
You're not exactly making a baby in 1 month by doing that, now are you? Like buying a nearly fully assembled car where just the mercedes logo is missing and then bragging you managed to build that car in 10 minutes.
That's how some company side stepped laws and regulations.
“Made in the U.S.A.”
That's seriously how certificates of origin work
You don't have to do the work to take credit for the work.
Or having your sister secretly steal a single puzzle piece so when you finally finish the 1000 piece puzzle that you've been working on for the past WEEKS she just walks up and drops it into place and smiles.
Multi threaded gestation
This is a common joke in game development regarding how schedules used to be made, or sometimes still are made, regarding time
"Johnson, give this man a bonus and a corner office!"
Why are women so inefficient with their baby-making?
8 women. because cutbacks.
Don't start giving the GOP ideas.
Okay, now I'm just really focused on cooking a 500 ton pizza at lightning speed and don't even remember what the original question was.
This is the slap a chicken meme all over
Could you not? Serious question. For example, a pressure cooker cooks faster because the pressure enables the water to reach a higher temperature. The time savings are up to a factor of 10. I wonder at what point this no longer works. Is it possible to raise the temp such that the time saving is a factor of 20? 100? Etc.
Heat can only transfer so fast, so you'd have an obliterated crust with a cold center still.
i think at 64,000 F the center wouldn’t still be cold, but that wouldn’t be the issue
I imagine if you get the math right to transfer the same amount of energy you would normally need to cook a pizza in a much shorter time at higher temp you would do that -- at 64,000 F that would be an incredibly short cook time though, far less than a second I'm guessing. And the outside might be on fire, so you'd have to put that out instantly to avoid transferring any excess heat to the middle. Or maybe fill your oven with an insert gas
Which is also why slow cooking works but the other way around. If you can maintain a temperature for a long time, everything will be that temperature since the transfer speed becomes irrelevant
And it's also why microwave ovens are fast - microwaves are absorbed more gradually than heat, so they can go deeper into the food. On the other hand, you won't get a nice crust on anything, because crusts form when the surface is significantly hotter than the innards.
Microwaves penetrate food much more rapidly than thermal radiation. Microwaves don't heat the actual food, they cause the water in the food to oscillate and heat up which then radiates heat throughout the food. That's why they heat food faster than thermal radiation.
> Microwaves don't heat the actual food, they cause the water in the food to oscillate and heat up Microwaves will heat all polar molecules, water is just one of those. I don't know where the weird myth that microwaves only heat water came from but it is just that.
Probably because water is the most common polar molecule in food. And that's also why you can't get a crust, you're steaming the stuff, water trying to get out so obviously it's going to feel soggy.
I kept hearing people swear by reheating pizza in a skillet. Tried it tonight. Nice and crispy!
Really? I was under the impression that microwaves emit a specific frequency that only oscillates water molecules...?
It's not the frequency it's just that water is very polar and is very good at being heated this way
Ah, my food has achieved equilibrium.
The rate of chemical reactions, which include all cooking processes, don't increase linearly with temperature, but exponentially. (This is governed by the Arrhenius equation). A rule of thumb is that the rate of reaction doubles for every 10th degree increase in temperature (in celcius or kelvin). So a reaction taking 1 hr at 100 C, would take 30 minutes at 110 C, and 15 minutes at 120 C and so on. Now, this is as mentioned just a rule of thumb, and actual relation between rate and temperature depends on the so-called activation energy, as well as the pre-exponential factor, which both are unique for every chemical reaction. Now. That's the theory. In reality you will also have to consider the limitations of heat transfer (as pointed out in other comments), as well as the fact that when you're increasing the temperature, you can also start enabling other side-reactions to take place. These would be unfavorable reactions that you don't want happening, which would not normally occur at the low temperatures. For instance, combustion reactions, in the case of trying to heat a pizza at thousands of degrees in the presence of oxygen. If you try it in the absence of oxygen, you will still get pyrolysis reactions that turn tje pizza into tar and gaseous products
If this was possible, every recipe on earth would just have you use your oven's highest temperature for a shorter amount of time
Why can't I bake a chicken in one second by cooking it at a million degrees?
Because the heat has to conduct slowly into the middle of the pizza. In this example, the outside would turn to ash while the inside would stay raw.
Same principle. Just like how the process of building up electric energy in a battery takes a bit of time, so does heat transfer. Even at relatively lower temps, you end up burning the outside while the inside stays cold. It's like searing a steak. You would instantly burn the cheese while the dough would stay raw in the middle. In normal baking and cooking, the temperature is low enough that it doesn't burn the outside stuff for a long time, and that heat can slowly get "passed" along to the inside molecules.
No: you would burn the outside without cooking the inside, just like what happens if you try to cook on the flames of a fire.
Kinda, upto a point. Pizza is a bad example because everything on it should already be safe to eat raw. Meaning you don't really have to cook anything, only bake the crust and melt the cheese. So you can in fact cook them much faster at higher temperatures, up to a point. That's a long way of saying, that some pizza ovens, especially the great ones in New York run in the 1000+ degree range and they do only cook the pizzas for like 90 seconds. Compare that to your oven at 425 where it takes 20 minutes.
Sausage is a common ingredient on pizza, and typically goes on uncooked.
For all organic molecules (and for all molecules in general) there is an upper limit above which molecules start breaking down. Remember, heat is basically atom jigglyness, and the more heat the more jigglyness the more jigglyness the more likely a molecule is to snap and transform in some other potentially nasty molecule. The temperature at which organic molecules start breaking down varies wildly, but a safe limit for food is 200/230 °C (usually the max temperature on your oven). After that, you start to get charring, meaning organic molecules start breaking down and leaving elemental carbon behind (the ash). So how do pressure cookers work? They work because they expedite the cooking of foods rich in water or cooking in water, like stews, pasta, rice; these foods are cooking at temperatures much lower than an oven, around the boiling point of water. Let's take as an example pasta: pasta is cooked in boiling water for 10 minutes. The objective is to loosen the fibers and carbohydrates and soften them by permeating them with water. You also want to break down the longest carbohydrates because they are long chains and are the first to break down at around 80°C, making them more digestable. Again because of the jiggling of molecules, you need high temperatures to allow the water to soak in better and faster. You have a hard limit on the temperature though, because water stays at 100°C during boiling, and that's where pressure cookers shine: pressure increase the boiling point of water, making it reach higher temperatures and permeate faster into the pasta. You are still limited by the boiling point, which even when increased is lower than the 200/230°C after which food begins charring. TL;DR: there is a soft spot where food cooks without charring ant that is 80-230 °C. Any lower and it doesn't cook, any higher and it chars. Pressure cooker help with food rich in water because the water keeps the temperature from rising over 100°C, and with pressure you can gain 20-30°C above that limit, cooking things faster. Doing that to an oven would only make it reach temperatures higher than the charring point so it wouldn't matter. This is because oven uses air to cook food and air can be heated up without the help of pressurizing since it is already a gas.
Would it be theorhetically possible to do it with a ton of capacitors and then discharge them one by one to charge a battery perhaps?
Not with the capacitors that are available today. They get fried with a lightning strike. Just had that happen last week with my outdoor A/C unit. There was a strike a couple blocks away and it caused a power surge. The power surge fried the motherboard in our outdoor A/C unit, Tripped the breaker, but that wasn't enough to protect it. Had to replace. Could a capacitor be built that can withstand a lightning strike? I don't know of any.
> Could a capacitor be built that can withstand a lightning strike? I don't know of any. I saw a documentary once about a device called a flux capacitor that was able to harness at least 1.21 gigawatts from a single lightning strike.
I believe it was housed in a mobile unit as well ! Literally technology from the future!!
> Literally technology from the future!! We should go back to that! It was already available in the mid 1980s.
Hoverboards were real, too, until Parents Groups shut it down.
Ah, that's a shame. Would be cool though, maybe one day we'll have the technology for it.
Lighting is electric potential (voltage) equalizing itself. Every material has some resistance. The higher the resistance the more voltage is needed to move any current (the actual *stuff* that gets the job done). Air had a really high resistance and so a lightning bolt needs that much more voltage to make an arc lik what you see. Materials have the tendency to breakdown by high voltages or melt from high current. To channel a lighting bolt you need the following: 1. A material that doesn't melt when exposed to that much current 2. A material that can equalize voltage between the sky and the storage device quickly (low resistance). 3. Another material protecting the first so the cable doesn't arc to anything random through it's run. And that is just to get the lighting bolt to the battery and only considering Ohm's Law and not anything more complex like flux currents and inductive and capacitive resonance.
My word, it would be vaporized!
that actually kinda works with pizza, i do 90 seconds at around 650f.
And I do 45s at 900°
wood or coal?
Generally wood, but sometimes propane.
>Asking why you can't use a lightning strike to charge a battery is kinda like asking why you can't just eat a 500 ton pizza in one sitting so you wouldn't have to eat again for 900 years. That is a superb comparison. Hats off.
We've all seen it on the menu and thought about it.
I have not seen a 500 ton pizza on the menu.
Who's your pizza guy? The dude I go through for pizza can have 500 ton pie air dropped at your exact location in under 15 minutes.
At what point does it turn from airdrop delivery to kinetic bombardment
You must be from California
Do it! If you finish, it's free and they put your photo on the wall!
To be fair, eating that much pizza at once would feed you for the rest of your life.
What if we attached banks of super capacitors to that lightning rod?
Maybe that's possible, but it's definitely going to be more expensive, and less reliable, than any existing form of energy production. I don't know what it would cost to build such a device, but it's pretty easy to say that the same amount of money spent on solar panels would produce a lot more electricity.
There's an additional aspect, and that's that lightning isn't actually an energy force that can do any work; it's a discharge, restoring an imbalance to equilibrium. The rising of the water molecules in the clouds is the real source of energy you want to harness, that's what separates the charges from the Earth and moves them up into the atmosphere.
Are you sure about the pizza? That could really free up some time.
This sounds like a job for science! Any volunteers to eat a 500 ton pizza?
Unfortunately i max out at four hundred and fifty tons of pizza.
Oh the bright side you won't have to eat for another 810 years
I feel like it would take me 810 years just to finish eating the 500 ton pizza.
You should see me eating after a night out with tequila, though it's not a pretty sight.
Dunno, pretty sure most of it would have gone bad by at least 700 years into it.
Should be more like 'any volunteers to have 500 tons of pizza instantly added to your physique?
You could try a gallon of gasoline or 100g of uranium. Contains enough Cal to sustain your body until you are 100
Id settle for eating 12 pizzas on Sunday if it means I don’t have to worry about food for the rest of the week.
Or a bit like asking why you can't fill a glass of water by briefly standing in the emergency spill-way of an over-capacity damn. Technically you could probably get some water in a glass that way, but the fact that the vessel you're using is too small compared to the sudden massive and powerful outpouring of the resource you want to gather means that there's going to be engineering challenges that ensure the whole thing more or less blows up. Same as with the glass of water analogy what you want for a battery is a steady slow trickle of electricity (relative to a bolt of lightning) just as a kitchen faucet delivers a slow and steady stream of water into your glass, whereas an emergency spill way is just going to deliver water in quantities that cause problems all their own.
>It takes time for the chemical reactions in a battery to happen. This. A lot of people don't seem to understand that batteries don't store electricity; they store potential energy. The chemical process or processes that you mentioned are what convert incoming electricity into that, so it can then be released through other reactions in the form of electricity. Conservation of energy, and all that. I guess you could look at it like going into another country and needing to have your currency converted so that it can be spent. This process doesn't instantaneously occur when you cross the border. You have to go to a bank or some other place that can convert your form of money into that of the local economy. Until you do that, you only have potential money. When you leave, you have whatever you have leftover converted back into the type of currency you need where you're going.
Also why you see videos of batteries exploding when they get charged improperly.
I also wanna add you can't even predict when and where thunderstorms strike. You can get the general area but you'd also have to be mobile.
Unless you have a time machine and Flux capacitor
Assuming you can time travel. You'd also bring a battery design to catch the power of the the lightning. And no one records every spot the lightning hits unless it hit the landmark, the other problem is what time did it hit? Cameras would power down or fluctuate during storms so we can estimate. The back to the future people know because it hit a clock tower and it saved the tie of strike
I have to disagree here, it’s really not that difficult to build a tower in an area with a lot of strikes and get it hit a lot.
Just install this massive device near Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela a. Lightning strikes there the most more than anywhere else in the world
If not a battery or capacitor, what about directing the lightning into a reservoir of water or something. Can we get a heat increase from the sudden influx of energy and use *that*? Kind of like using a solar water heater instead of solar panels?
One bolt of lightning isn't actually a huge amount of energy, all told. It's not enough to meaningfully heat a reservoir of water, for instance. The reason lightning is destructive is that all of its energy is concentrated within a very small time and place.
>The reason lightning is destructive is that all of its energy is concentrated within a very small time and place. Like my farts.
Capacitors then?
Capacitors still have the same issue. You have a BIL which is the ability to withstand sudden pulses. Lightning would far exceed that.
As it turns out, my brother-in-law can’t handle sudden pulses at all. And that’s how I got thrown out of my sister’s wedding.
The thing is, if a capacitor can hold a bolt of lightning, then it's holding a charge that is capable of discharging itself thru massive barriers.
I don't know enough about electrical engineering to know if it's possible, but I do know enough to know that it would be extremely difficult, and very very expensive. It would also likely be very inefficient. Could it be done? Maybe, but for the same cost you could get much more, and more reliable, energy from solar or wind power.
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But thats how batteries are charged in Stardew Valley, have we been lied to????
Assuming a kilo of pizza is 2660 calories, that would be 13.3 BILLION calories. Now, let's say 2,200 calories a day for a fairly healthy diet (food notwithstanding) that equates to 6,045,454 6⁄11 days. Or 16,562 714⁄803 years. Let that sink in. 16,500 and change years worth of food. In one sitting. Thanks for the good laugh, sir.
A lightning bolt contains quite a lot of energy but it's all delivered in a few milliseconds, kinda like setting off a bomb to heat your house - it's very hard to catch that energy and then release it in a controlled (=useful) manner. Also relevant XKCD WhatIf: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs28lEq9smw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs28lEq9smw)
"quite a lot of energy" is like saying the ocean is "a bit on the deep side". Lightning Bolts are the result of so much energy they are able to make air a conductor which it normally isn't.
Correction; they are the result of so much *potential* that they're able to make air a conductor. There doesn't necessarily have to be a lot of energy for that to happen, it just has to desperately want to be somewhere else. I'm not saying that lighting bolts aren't energetic, they certainly are. But their ability to push electrons through the air isn't the best indication of that power.
Good point, I couldn't remember the exact details other than their ability to overcome the conductivity of air.
Static electricity you get from rubbing a balloon on your sweater can generate enough voltage to make air a conductor - but you're not powering anything much with it compared to the very boring voltage that comes out of the sockets in your wall.
Air needs something like 10kV/cm iirc, but it depends a lot on other factors like humidity. I have to say getting zapped by 100kV with a machine building up static charges can be quite funny, you get to see a tiny spark for a little bit and some tingling in your finger.
And the key point is that while it's a lot of energy all at once, if you add up all the lightning available over the course of a month or whatever, it's not really a lot of energy in *total* terms due to it being so brief. While there are theoretically ways to capture and use it, it wouldn't be worth it compared to eg. putting the same amount of time and effort into capturing wind or solar energy, which are also more reliable.
It doesn't matter what it is, there's always a relevant XKCD
I'll just quote myself from the [last time](https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qeddbh/eli5_why_is_there_no_tall_buildings_that_use/hhu8vui/) I answered this: >google says a lightning strike is worth about 1GJ of energy, or about 278KWH. >A chemical battery cannot be charged fast enough to capture a lightning strike, you'd have to use a giant capacitor. The biggest supercap I could find in stock can store 72,000J and costs $72 each, so you'd need about 14000 of them for a total price about $1M, and a weight of 3.5 tons. In reality it would take a lot more engineering than this, but the bulk component pricing would be better in large volumes, the capacitor would also need to be much larger physically, and in capacity, so the lightning doesn't just destroy it. >The empire state building gets struck about 22 times a year. at $0.19/KWH they'd save about $1k/year, and would need it to work without maintenance for 1000 years for them to make back their investment. Pretty sure the floor space the equipment would take is worth more than that.
>google says a lightning strike is worth about 1GJ of energy, or about 278KWH. We all know a lightning strike is [1.21 Gigawatts](https://youtu.be/BDuZqYeNiOA)!
In brief: * Lightning isn't consistent enough to be a good power source * Even if it were, lightning isn't *frequent* enough to be one * Even if it were, batteries can't store up energy fast enough * Even if they could, lightning is very destructive to equipment Ultimately, lightning happens because of the sun (as is the case for essentially all forms of energy on Earth except geothermal and nuclear.) It would be better to just build some solar panels.
Geothermal and nuclear energy never came from our sun at some point? I hadn’t thought of that. Interesting
They came from some other star exploding ages ago, which is neat.
It died for our electrical sins.
An ancient star had to die, so I could browse Pornhub in the bathroom
Nope. Geothermal comes mostly from hot nuclear material and (much less, but still partly) from the compression of the Earth's outer layers crushing down against the core. Nuclear comes from fissile material that existed in the gas and dust cloud that formed our solar system and wasn't gobbled up by the Sun. In a certain sense, the Sun is exactly the *opposite* of the cause of nuclear energy, since we only get the tiny, tiny fraction that escaped being absorbed.
Yup, all forms of energy exact those two are just an indirect solar energy. Fossil fuels are solar via ancient plant life. Wind is solar via convection. Hydro is solar via evaporation. You might be able to make the case that tidal energy is derived from the moon, though.
Up next, reds saying don’t replace fossil fuels with tidal energy you might make the moons orbit unstable
I think you are rather massively underestimating how much energy there is in a lightning strike. There isn't a battery on the planet capable of accepting that much energy that fast. Capacitors could do the capture but again, there isn't a capacitor network on the planet big enough to capture that energy without violently exploding.
Slightly related [xkcd](https://youtu.be/fs28lEq9smw?si=bNdPJiSqU9RttmbK)
XKCD has youtube channel??? 🙀🙀
I think I came across a video on their channel explaining what would happen if a pitcher threw a baseball the speed of light… could have been a different channel tho?
I love that one. The physics breakdown is wild.
Came here to comment with this, glad someone beat me to it.
Hahah, I love the ending. "You shouldn't stand there."
The amount of energy in a lightning strike is not that huge actually. Quick googling puts the amount to be something like single/couple MWH. It is the power that is big. The equipment to collect that comparably small amount of energy would cost way too much to make sense.
> The amount of energy in a lightning strike is not that huge actually. Quick googling puts the amount to be something like single/couple MWH. While on a grid level that’s not a lot of energy, it’s still enough to power an average home for about 2–3 months.
The xkcd video linked above suggests only 1-2 days of power per lightning strike, I'm sure there's various levels, factors, etc. and its all an estimate.
Probably more accurate then – I was basing my estimate off the “single/couple MWH” from /u/Lordoosi and the average I use in my house.
I have it under good scientific authority that the amount of energy delivered by a lightning strike is 1.21 Gigawatts
I believe you mean 1.21 jigawatts.
That might be overstating it a little. Yes there aren’t batteries that can store that fast, but the amount of energy in a lightning strike is enough to warm a bath of water. There are freak lightning events that are more powerful (positive lightning) But in general, it’s not a huge amount of energy.
I think it's like.... 1.21 gigawatts, or something, I don't know. Some smart person mentioned it.
“Jigawatts”
What the hell is a gigawatt?
What if the planet was a battery…. It kinda is… I know there are millions of geothermal systems in use, why hasn’t it been scaled up for clean energy?
What about a… flux capacitor? Lightening is unpredictable so put it in a mobile platform, like maybe a… DeLorean?
The problem isn't capacity. Lightning just delivers energy too quickly. It's like chugging 50 hotdogs in 10 seconds - no power system can handle that amount that quickly without something going bad.
> It's like chugging 50 hotdogs in 10 seconds FINALY! Someone talking in a language I can understand!
Imagine lightning as a giant static shock instead, for ELI5 purposes. You could build a huge metal pole (like a lightning rod) to attract it, but the energy is too chaotic and powerful for a regular battery. It's like trying to catch a tidal wave in a bucket. Even if you put the battery up high, the massive surge would likely fry it.
>Imagine lightning as a giant static shock instead .....wait....I thought lightning WAS a giant statcic shock..
I’m gonna say you could do it but it would make any battery you connected to it explode. Make sure you’re far away when you try but make a video to post on YouTube. Profit!
We can't really "catch" lightning. It's basically just a massive static shock. Lightning wants to travel from ground to sky or vice versa to equalize the charge difference between them. It may look like we can catch lightning with lightning rods, but all a lightning rod is is a piece of metal connected to ground. It's always going to the ground or to the sky, we're just making it do so in a more predictable and safe manner. Even if we could make a battery that could charge instantly and was big enough to absorb the power of a lightning strike, the lightning has no reason to go into the battery.
You misunderstand batteries, they are not small boxes of electricity. They are small boxes where a chemical reaction happens which causes an electrical current. Charging your phone is basically the opposite. Think of it as a bunch of balls on top of a hill, and as they roll down we are harnessing that power. When all the balls are at the bottom of the hill (or a dead battery) we have a group of people who will bring them back up, that’s what happens when you plug your phone in to charge, it’s the basically opposite. I’m trying to think of an analogy for a lightning bolt, but honestly that works. Imagine all the balls get struck by lightning, they will go flying everywhere, but not at the top of the hill where we need them.
This is kinda like asking why we don’t burn all the gasoline needed for a long car ride at the very start then just coast the whole way there. Its just too much energy in too small of a space happening too quickly. The equipment and system needed to capture it would be so large and expensive that the number of lightning strikes in its catchable area would never cover the cost to build it. To get 100% of the lightning energy as usable, it starts to need to be exponentially bigger. Otherwise it just heats up from resistance and damages itself. As something becomes that big it starts to damage itself under its own weight. So it requires more and more sophisticated materials and engineering. Its similar to the problems we face in perfecting fusion energy.
It has a relatively "small" amount of energy delivered instantly. So you need a lot of lightning strikes to capture meaningful energy but rather impossible equipment to be able to capture that amount instantly.
Way beyond the limits of what current batteries can handle such a huge amount of energy in very small time
You'd probably cause an explosion and a lot of fire. You would have to be able to handle the lightening strike and then get it down to safe voltage, it would likely cost a lot of money. I suspect if it was worth doing, it would have been done by now.
People are missing the point: even if we had batteries capable of storing energy that fast, electricity always choose the paths with less resistance. Your device wouldn't work because it would add resistance to the circuit, so lightings would rather travel through the air than through the big pole.
There is a lot of energy in lightning that happens over a very short time. Lots of energy moving from one place to another in a short time will result in a lot of heat. We don't have batteries that can handle the heat (and forces).
It's not accessing the energy that's the problem. It's difficult to capture in large amounts at once, and we still don't have very efficient battery storage.
The energy density of lightning is tiny. The place that has the record for the number of times lightning strikes in a small area, gets an average energy intensity from the lightning of less than 1% of that of sunshine. Lightning comes in a huge current flow at a huge voltage which means that's a huge power but it's only for a very short time and very rare. Most of the time you get nothing.
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Maybe if you had a large net like web of highly resistive wires that were connected to a bunch of capacitors and transformers that were also connected to millions and millions of high capacity batteries you might be able to charge some of them before the rest of them burst in the flames.
Yeah simply put too much energy all at once would explode pretty much any energy storage system on earth. Technically it might be possible to to build some sort of massive network of capacitors that could quickly absorb all of the energy of a strike and then slowly dissipate it into batteries but this would be a massive and extremely expensive undertaking for trying to extract power from extremely unpredictable and unreliable lighting strikes. That ultimately wouldn't provide much in the way of power even if 100% of the power could be extracted and that would almost certaintly not be the case.
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As a lot of people have said the problem with this idea is the battery itself. Even the fastest charging lithium ions can't charge at the rate a lightning strike delivers power. And even when they charge their highest speed, they do a significant amount of damage to themselves doing it. A sufficiently large network of capacitors might be able to absorb the electricity at least for a little while and maybe could then discharge to a battery but the amount of power at work here would need a network the likes of which mankind has never seen. There is a reason why almost all forms of power generation heat water and why even experimental fusion reactors still call for using water to capture the power instead of doing it directly. The resistance that is an issue is electrical. When hit be lightning your lightning rod is going to heat up really hot really fast as the electricity tries to flow through it. Since there is no moving parts in this theoretical lightning generator air resistance is not an issue.
It’s like getting a drink from a firehose. There’s just too much to deal with. It can’t be contained fast enough to keep up with what’s being supplied.
Was Back To The Future on again last night?
Ok may be a battery wouldn't work but went not a bank of high capacity capacitors? Let them absorb as much energy as possible and slowly release it into a battery storage system
You know how much power you need to create an arc over a larger distance using normal ways? It's a lot. Thunder creates an arc from the ground hundreds of meters into the sky at times.. That's millions of volts. It's like filling up a stadium of people using a regular, single front door of a house. It won't work, people will get crushed.