In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.
TRUTH: Although a lightning strike involves tremendous levels of voltage and current, the extremely short duration of the stroke results in very little usable energy, if there was a way to capture it. And by its very nature, lightning is a sudden, violent release of energy that would destroy any device designed to attempt it.
You could compare this idea to building a water turbine generator downstream from a dam that was about to burst. Even if your turbine survived the violent rush of water, you'd only have a few seconds of usable electricity.
Furthermore, unless you're Marty McFly in a time machine, there is no way to predict exactly when and where lightning will strike. With tall towers and skyscrapers, you might be guaranteed 8 to 10 strikes a year, which won't result in enough captured energy to make it practical (assuming a storage device did exist).
And lastly, once a lightning discharge occurs, you've lost about half of the energy in the form of light, sound and radio waves. In other words, the lightning discharge itself is using up a big chunk of your available energy. To capture a strike's full available energy, you'd need to find a way to extract the charge in the cloud before the lightning strike can occur. Again, lightning is sort of like a dam bursting - a gargantuan, catastrophic failure of the insulating 'dam' of air between the cloud and ground. Just like a hydroelectric plant can generate electricity from the potential energy in a reservior by slowly tapping the available energy, the same principle would have to be applied to the charged cloud. Rather than waiting for the 'dam' of air to burst in the form of a lightning strike, it would be better to slowly tap and store the available charge in a controlled fashion.
About the Author: Dan Robinson has been a storm chaser, photographer and cameraman for 33 years. His career has involved traveling around the country covering the most extreme weather on the planet including tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning, floods and winter storms. Dan has been extensively published in newspapers, magazines, web articles and more, and has both supplied footage for and appeared in numerous television productions and newscasts. He has also been involved in the research community, providing material for published scientific journal papers on tornadoes and lightning.
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From Dan: Please Read
To my regular readers, I offer my apologies for this heavy-handed notice. Unfortunately it has become necessary, so please bear with me!
Please don't copy/upload this site's content to social media or other web sites. Those copies have been a critical problem for me, seriously harming this site and my photography/storm chasing operation by diverting traffic, viewers, engagement and income. "Credit" and "exposure" does not benefit this site or my operation, rather they threaten my ability to cover my operating expenses. Please read my full explanation for this notice here.
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