Check out the previous article on Lightning.
Did you know that a single lightning bolt unleashes five times more heat than the sun?
That’s a lot of energy seeing that 40 minutes of sunlight contains enough energy to power all of Earth’s energy needs for an entire year.
Or to put it more scientifically, the sun release energy at a mass-energy conversion rate equal to 38,460 septillion watts per second.
Yes, “septillion” is a real number. Unfortunately, I don’t think Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or even Jeff Bezos will ever actually get to be septillionaires since septillion has 24 zeroes behind it.
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That’s what a septillion looks like.
A lightning bolt is estimated to contain more than one billion volts of electricity. That’s a tremendous amount of energy. To translate this, a single bolt of lightning has enough energy to power a small town for an entire day!
But surprisingly, all that energy strikes within 50 microseconds.
To make it more intense, a lightning bolt is extremely narrow by the time it hits Earth, anywhere between 1-7 inches in diameter.
That is so much concentrated energy, so fast!
Then I asked myself, what would happen if a lightning bolt struck an egg?
I know, it sounds crazy, but apparently, I’m not the first person to have asked that question. I kid you not, there’s an entire Reddit thread about the odds of lightning cooking an egg to a consumable point.
How Many Times Does Lightning Strike Earth?
Lightning strikes Earth about 100 times every single second. That’s about three billion lightning bolts a year!
Imagine how many small towns or entire cities could be powered if we could just figure out a way to harness that energy.
These ten cities experience the most lightning density in the U.S. are:
1. Green River, WY
2. Rock Springs, WY
3. Dickinson, ND
4. Pierre, SD
5. North Platte, NE
6. Vernal, UT
7. Huron, SD
8. Spearfish, SD
9. Kirksville, MO
10. Hays, KS
Harnessing Electricity
Can you capture lightning’s electricity and transform it into a form useable by, well… your cell phone, your light bulbs, or a manufacturing plant?
The concept exists but according to MIT, it poses many challenges that have not yet been solved. According to a paper they released:
“Tall metallic rods extending high above the ground would do the trick, drawing any electrical charges in the atmosphere and directing them into a facility. But robust and dependable safety mechanisms would also need to be built to immediately contain the huge burst of energy and prevent the entire facility from being blown to bits.”
While we have not yet developed a way to harness the electricity contained in a lightning bolt, we have developed ways to create energy from the plentiful energy sources that surround us.
In nature, everywhere you look electricity is at work, it’s just a matter of harnessing that power.
The Most Popular Sources of Natural Energy
- Solar energy
- Wind energy
- Hydro energy
- Tidal energy
- Geothermal energy
- Biomass energy
As demand for electricity grows, more and more businesses are establishing green energy or renewable energy goals. Installing your own means of renewable energy production, such as solar panels, is not only a large investment, but it can sometimes be challenging to offset your entire energy needs.