People should harvest lightning, from thunderstorms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy

They tried that. Seems its not all that practical, unfortunately.

People should harvest lightning, from thunderstorms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy
They tried that. Seems its not all that practical, unfortunately.

It might be, if the "philosophy" is changed.

The "philosophy" of a good lightning rod is not to arm the house to withstand a massive strike of lightning, but to prevent it from happening in the first place (by moving the zero potential from somewhere in the ground below the house high up, so potential equalization happens earlier, steadily, and without needing to turn air into plasma first, and without kabooooooom). Mind you that lightning hardly ever strikes a radio tower despite them being the first obvious thing to strike, wonder why?

Now, if one would change the "philosophy" from harvesting lightning to steadily draining charge from thunderstorms, that might actually work. So instead of blasting everything to smithereens by absorbing 1,000-2,000kWh almost instantly and then not knowing where to get energy from until lightning strikes again next week, one might launch a baloon with a long cord, or something... and absorb 100 or 1,000kW for an hour, or for as long as a nasty black cloud is above the place.

But it sounds a lot easier than it really is. Thunderstorms are kind of variable and unpredictable, and you really don't want to have a situation where you suddenly feed twice the expected voltage into the net, or something. So... you'd need some kind of very fast dynamic resistor, at the very least.