Hope you do not mind if I do some combining/replying . ..
wooferhound:
and the second question would be
How many volts would this capaciter need to be rated at
no Solid State inverters here
Phil:
Since it (my pondering) is a string of capacitors, they do not have to be rated to handle the full voltage, Caps in a series make a voltage divider - so say a million volts across a 1000 capacitors (just making some simple numbers for our conversation) would only have to handle a 1000 volts, each . ... (1e6 volts / 1000 = 1000 volts).
I would not really be inclined to do solid state inverters for something like this. Maybe so, but my initial guess would be old DC motor generator sets. But maybe solid state, but you have to keep the cost low.
wooferhound:
OK , I googled around trying to find out about the energy in lightning. The figures I found were WILDLY VARYED and almost none of the sites I found had the same numbers and figures. I also found out that a large part of the energy in lightning is in the form of Heat and Radio Waves. Here is some of the better sites I saw . . .
Phil:
Thanks. Thanks a lot. I will be reading them tonight. Quick review of your observations . . .
wooferhound:
Forum discussion stating that the biggest bolt of lightning only has One Megawatt Hour of energy
Phil:
That sounds reasonable. At 10 cents a kilowatt/hour, that makes them worth about $100 each?
Boy that is a grim way to look at harvesting nature, huh? $100 bucks a lightning bolt, do I hear $101? And we got some lovely redwoods and rivers to harvest, too. Get your bids in now.
wooferhound:
Kinda weird Article about storing the power of Lightning into a Bank of CRTs Cathode Ray Tubes)
Phil:
Yeah, you can store electricity in a lot of weird ways. CRT tubes do handle some high voltage.
wooferhound:
Another discussion ending up saying you should tap the energy from the cloud before the strike
Phil:
I would tend to strongly agree with that. There are some very simple static combs designs that use a spark-gap (similar to a spark plug) to discharge energy to a capacitor bank when the voltages reach the low 1000's volts.
wooferhound:
Informative page saying that Lighning is several hundred million volts and 5000 to 20000 Amps
Phil:
Sounds about in line with 1 megawatt/hour observation - if we are using the lower numbers and allowing a 1/10 of a second . . . (1/36000th of an hour) . . . . 100e6 volts * 5000 amps * 1/36000 = 1.39 megawatt hours.
But those numbers sound GREAT for a rail or coil gun. I am thinking cheap space launch of small things.
wooferhound:
Discussion talking about using lightning to make Hydrogen and Oxygen from water
Phil:
Yeah, could do that. I sort of like ocean-based remote Big Wind for that.
Well, thanks again.