"Catch" lightning, turn it into energy, storage is the key!

On September 15, affected by strong thunderstorm clouds, heavy to torrential rain occurred in central and southern Guangzhou, with local torrential rain.

Thunder and lightning are often present during rainstorms. As a peculiar discharge phenomenon, thunder and lightning are daunting because of their high risk of disaster. Lightning strikes damage or even collapse buildings, set forests and grass on fire, and cause casualties to people and animals. Thunder and lightning can also damage various electrical equipment, interfere with and interrupt the normal operation of telecommunications systems. In my country, thunder and lightning disasters are the third most harmful meteorological disaster after rainstorms, floods, and meteorological and geological disasters.

In fact, lightning is not only harmful to humans, but also a valuable resource: lightning synthesizes a large amount of natural fertilizer to fertilize plants, and can also strengthen the metabolism of crops and promote agricultural development; lightning purifies the air, provides good lighting conditions for plant growth, and is beneficial to human health. Lightning also has a huge impact on human society: the fire generated by lightning inspired ancient humans to understand and use fire, and began to get used to eating cooked food, which greatly improved physical strength and intelligence, prolonged life, and promoted the development of civilization; lightning enabled humans to discover the role of electricity and use electrical energy to create modern civilization.

Although people have long understood the nature of lightning, they still have only a partial understanding of many mysteries in the process of lightning occurrence, or even know nothing about them. Therefore, if people can "catch" lightning and study it, they can not only understand its "temperament", but also more effectively prevent and reduce the harm of lightning, and even use lightning. Therefore, scientists began to explore a set of methods for artificially controlling lightning, such as artificially inducing lightning.

Artificial lightning induction is to use certain devices and facilities to trigger lightning at a designated location in a lightning environment, just like being "caught" by someone, so that the originally random natural lightning can proceed in a controllable state in time and space. Lightning-inducing rockets are the main tools for artificial lightning induction.

So, what can the scientific and technological personnel do after risking their lives to "catch" lightning? There are many things that can be done. In addition to improving my country's lightning disaster prevention capabilities, preventing hail and reducing disasters by influencing the weather, it can also be used for breeding, especially using the energy of lightning.

Data shows that a lightning bolt can be as powerful as a small nuclear power plant. The power of a lightning bolt can reach 10 billion kilowatts, which is thousands of times the power generation capacity of my country's Gezhouba Hydropower Station. There are 8 million lightning strikes on Earth every day, so lightning around the world releases about 25 billion degrees of energy every year. Moreover, lightning energy is a gift from nature and does not produce any pollution. If we can store and utilize the "captured" lightning through artificial lightning induction to alleviate the energy crisis, it will have immeasurable value.

However, some people believe that the energy released by a lightning strike is not as great as we imagine. If we spend huge manpower and material resources to obtain only a small amount of lightning energy, it is not worth the loss. Since the time and place of lightning are very random, there are not many opportunities to collect lightning energy, and the artificial lightning energy is difficult to store and use. Since the instantaneous discharge current and voltage are very large, the instantaneous power of lightning is very strong. At present, there is no suitable energy storage device that can withstand the test of lightning strikes. Even if the huge energy of lightning can be obtained, this electrical energy cannot be stored in large capacity.

Although there are still many difficulties in utilizing lightning, and there is no urgency in reality, these are not reasons for us to completely give up the research and utilization of lightning. We believe that the day will come when the energy of lightning will finally come.

(The author is a member of the Hunan Science Writers Association)