What is the cost of lightning?

Once in a second-hand bookstore, I came across a book by I. Perelman “Entertaining Physics” of the 1924 edition. Printed on brown paper (and where did the good paper come from after the Civil War), it had a subtitle - "Paradoxes, puzzles, tasks, experiments, intricate questions and stories from the field of physics." This subtitle in subsequent editions from the childhood of the well-known book for some reason has disappeared. Just for the sake of curiosity, I wanted to find out what has changed in the book over the past 75 years. After all, at home I had the twenty-second edition of this widely known student youth book. But science and technology during this time did not stagnate.

My interest in Ya.I. Perelman was heated by the recently published book of G.I. Mishkevich about the life and work of an outstanding popularizer of science. “The singer of mathematics, the bard of physics, the poet of astronomy” was widely in demand in the country, recently agrarian and backward, and had just begun its journey into the number of advanced and cultural states of the world. And the role of Perelman in this development was far from the last. In his books, witty amusement, scientific certainty and even grace, even in his school years, helped the most talented part of the young generation to choose their future life path in the service of science.

In a biography book, it was somehow noted in passing that Ya.I. Perelman in 1916 worked at a special meeting of the Russian government on fuel and, "in connection with the deplorable state of wood heating in Petrograd," he proposed the first time in our country to switch to summer time. The fact that by using the clock hands to save energy on lighting has long been known to everyone. But how firewood was saved, I could not understand.

This fact interested me so much that I decided to ask the author of the biography book about it. Moreover, in one of the stories of the book I bought, when calculating the energy consumption for a lightning discharge, the data between Perelman and subsequent editions, released after the death of the popularizer, differed almost a hundred times!

A letter was sent and the reply came and put everything in its place. As for the saving of firewood, the explanation was very clear - during the First World War firewood burned as fuel in the boiler plants of St. Petersburg. That is the reason why in the very first years of Soviet power, the search began for a new type of fuel for electrifying the country (GOELRO Plan). Then they paid attention to peat.

Regarding the inconsistency of the calculations, I will allow you to quote from the letter of G.I. Mishkevich written to me: “ALL editions of his books that came out after the death of Ya. I. Perelman are CORRUPTED by all kinds of irresponsible editors and publishers.” Emphasized by the author of the letter. We add only that the "Doctor of Entertaining Sciences" died on March 16, 1942. from hunger in besieged Leningrad.

But I wanted to figure out the question "How much does lightning cost?" For this is the name of one of the chapters in the book of Perelman.

The first serious study of lightning was taken by the great American Benjamin Franklin, for some reason considered one of the US presidents in our country. He was not, but he immortalized his name by experimentally proving the electrical nature of a thunderstorm.

Then it was not easy to do. There were no skyscrapers, airplanes and even a balloon was not invented. And it was required to receive heavenly electricity literally in the hands for experiments. Indeed, in the first electric capacitor of that time, a Leiden bank, one of the two plates of it was the experimenter's hand.

Using a child’s toy called a kite, the experimenter introduced a conductor into a thundercloud, charged a Leyden jar, and then compared it with the same jar charged with an electric machine.

The behavior of the cans was identical. There was no doubt: the lightning discharge is electric in nature. He even determined that most often clouds carry a negative electric charge. Franklin's experiments were extremely dangerous, but they, in addition to very interesting scientific data, led to his invention of a lightning rod.

Another American, Charles Proteus Steinmets (1865-1923), is considered one of the main founders of the science of electrical engineering. In the last years of his life, he devoted himself to the issues of power transmission of energy to a distance using high voltage.

To solve the problems of isolation of high-voltage systems, he needed a high-voltage pulse generator. This was built by him. This generator could create an artificial lightning with a potential of 120 kilovolts. However, there is a scientific method called extrapolation, which allows you to distribute conclusions from observations in some conditions over similar phenomena in others. Although this method is far from perfect, but often nothing else can be applied to science.

In the USA, the monetarist method is often used to evaluate everything and everything. “You look like a thousand dollars,” the boss tells his secretary. A pianist insures his fingers for a million dollars. And the assessment of a football player’s talent in dollars has long been known even to our fans. For clarity, in assessing a lightning discharge, Ya.I. Perelman uses this very effective method, invented in the New World.

We read the initial data from Ya. I. Perelman: “Here is the calculation (to which we owe the recently deceased American electrical engineer Steinmets) The voltage during a lightning discharge is determined at about 5 million volts. The current is estimated at 10,000 amperes. "

In principle, knowing the voltage and current strength of any installation, it is easy to calculate its power by multiplying this data. Multiplying power by the time of its consumption, we obtain energy consumption. All this is true for lightning. But how long does the flash of this gigantic electric spark last? Can this time be measured?

It turns out not so difficult. The English physicist C. Wheatstone proposed using a rapidly rotating disk for this purpose, but with a certain, predetermined speed. A flash of lightning, illuminating this disk for a moment, will record how many degrees this disk has shifted. Knowing the number of revolutions of the disk, time conversion is not difficult to do, although the lightning discharge lasts only thousandths of a second.

It is much more difficult to obtain the calculated electrical parameters of lightning. After all, a thundercloud can be imagined as a charged capacitor, but when discharged, its currents and voltage change exponentially in time, that is, the function of the exponential.

Perelman editors provide other data. Their maximum lightning current is 200 thousand amperes, and the potential is 50 million volts. They divide the resulting power in half, explaining this use by them to calculate the average potential. The use in their calculations for some reason of the maximum current and the incorrectly calculated potential leads, of course, to incorrect results. So, the calculated energy according to Steinmets cannot be accepted due to unknown data taken from anywhere, and the results obtained by the editors are incorrect. Is it possible to calculate the energy consumed by lightning without resorting to its changing parameters. It turns out to be possible.

In the book of the outstanding researcher of lightning B. Schonland, another parameter is reported - the amount of electricity consumed by lightning during a discharge. “In individual strokes (lightning), a charge of 2 to 10 pendant is usually neutralized.” The calculation for this parameter is simplified, because one pendant is nothing but an ampere second. Another parameter - the voltage of a thundercloud, scientists are calculating, because it is not yet possible to measure it. According to B. Schonland, "it is estimated that this voltage is at least 100 million volts."

Let's do our calculations for this.Let us assume that the amount of electricity consumed when discharging ordinary lightning itself is 5 coulombs (This is a cross between 2 and 10) Then, when we multiply the coulombs by volts, we get 500 million watts-seconds, or 140 kilowatt-hours of nothing more. And with an average tariff in Russia at 2 rubles per kilowatt-hour, costs in rubles will amount to 280 rubles. For such a formidable phenomenon, the amount is very small. It should be noted that the calculation of C. Steinmets and the editors of Perelman when transferring to modern electricity tariffs yielded results of 30 and 2800 rubles, respectively. The result we obtained is closer to the result of Steinmets, but it still differs from it by an order of magnitude, i.e. 10 times! In other matters, this is easily explained by the fact that subsequent scientists estimate the cloud potential not at 5 million volts, but at 100 million, and we took the cloud charge from the ceiling.

It must be admitted that our calculations have no scientific value. They simply illustratively declare that such a formidable phenomenon as atmospheric electricity is not energy intensive and is unlikely to ever find practical use as a source of electricity. After all, a monthly energy consumption of 140 kWh is "wound up" by electric meters only for lighting the stairwell of a multi-storey building.

Are these results necessary for modern electricians? Of course they are needed, but only in order not to try to deal with the use of atmospheric electricity in industry and agriculture. It is economically unprofitable and very dangerous. We quote from one of the works of the American meteorologist L. Betten: “Oddly enough, lightning, which is an obligatory attribute of any thunderstorm, kills more people than any other weather phenomenon, except for unexpected floods.”

Watching flashes of lightning illuminating large spaces, any sane person should understand that this energy, wasted all night in his porch and apartment, is ultimately paid for by him and should strive for energy-saving light sources. The destructive nature of lightning is caused by the short duration of the process at high power and resembles an explosion of domestic gas in a house where a lot of gas is usually consumed in gas stoves. So a small gas leak in one of the apartments, which together with the air is an explosive mixture, leads to tragedies in the whole house.

We should pay tribute to Ch.P. Steinmets, the initiator of such a calculation, and to remind prepared readers that he, too, is the author of a symbolic method for calculating AC electrical circuits. And it costs a lot.

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