So I only need 5000 of them in a series.
I had also wondered about a multi-strand design with different lengths as a way to smear the initial step.
The real issue is that a strike is fast transient currents: I suspect that my normal calculations for voltage, current, transformers, inductance and capacitance don't hold. The amount of charge that travels through a lightning bolt is typically around 15 C, although for large bolts this can be up to 350 C.
The main problem with the whole idea is that the actual amount of kW is not that large. "a lightning bolt, which has over five billion Joules of energy, which could provide one household with all their energy needs for a month" which I presume is assuming 100% conversion and storage efficiency...
Edit: and this really screws with any possible design: "Occasionally a lightning stroke will travel from the positive charge region in the top of the thunderstorm cloud to ground. This type of lightning is called positive lightning and accounts for about 5% of all cloud-to-ground lightning strikes. Positive lightning is powerful and typically carries more current than normal cloud-to-ground lightning". The diagram showed normal lightning bolts at about 30kA, and the rarer positive lightning bolts (electrons go from ground to cloud) at 100 to 200kA.
But by the time you've dropped the voltage potential of the strike, is it worth it for the smaller amount of energy you'd recover?
These ideas seem too obvious to think that somebody hasn't already tried them and ruled them out though.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-cant-we-extra...
And maybe with effort you could build something lightning proof, but the gain is probably way too low. Still, if I would have the funds avaiable, it would be an awesome project ...
1 lightning bolt = 5e9/3.6e6 = 1389 kWh
price of energy = 0.10 $/kWh
price of 1 lightning bolt = $138.90
Not to mention the one-off R&D investment you'd be making, along with all the specialty hardware (and its up-front costs), training, etc. involved in capturing lightning. The savings just isn't even remotely worth it.
I've seen plenty of remote communications towers that do not have cables. Solar powered with generator backup and microwave relays to the next hop. It's SOP in the railroad industry, and how Sprint got its first backbone. (The "SPR" in "Sprint" is Southern Pacific Railroad.)
Except it would be new technology, could be patented etc.
It's mostly in fiction that fixing X for one person or situation doesn't proliferate into a new way to handle X altogether, and that's done in fiction so the storyline can save the day and then keep pretending we totally live in the same universe as actual reality.
> Except it would be new technology, could be patented etc.
I don't think this works. New technology can only spread if it is worth it. Developing technology for the sake of having new technology is almost always worse than nothing; you would not expect it to proliferate into a new way to handle anything.
Of course, it doesn't guarantee success.
100 strikes a year, it depends though if these are in one season.
This website runs the data for citizen lightning detectors, but you have to be a member to access the data:
http://map.blitzortung.org/#4.88/43.72/-5.29