ATMS 120 Online

Snodgrass

Name: LaTasha Smith, lmsmith9

Challenge Problem: Lightning Power
Since man discovered that lightning was essentially a very powerful electric spark, we have been
trying to develop ways to harness this power to provide electricity to our homes and cities.
For a typical lightning strike, the bolt is 5 km long, 2-3 cm wide, has a current between 15,000
and 30,000 amperes and can contain as much as 10 billion Joules of energy.
Part #1: How long (in days) would this amount of energy be able to supply power to Lincoln
Hall? (You must show your work.)
Assumptions:
Assume all of the energy can be stored and used.
1 kilowatt-hour = 3.6 million Joules
Electricity consumed by each square foot each year = 14 kW-hours (kilowatt-hours)
Square Footage of Lincoln Hall = 107,477 ft2
There are 365 days in a year, 24 hours in a day.
18kWhr*31,500ft =567,000kWhr/yr / 365 =1,553.42 kWhr/day
10,000,000,000 / 3,600,000 = 2,777.78 kWhr total
2,777.78 / 1,553.42 = 1.79 days
Part #2: In reality, 1% of the energy in a lightning strike is electrical and the rest is heat. Repeat
the same calculation you did in Part #1 assuming only 1% of the energy can be used to power the
building. For how long can the lightning strike power Lincoln Hall? (provide your answer in
hours)? (You must show your work.)
100,000,000 joules / 3,600,000 joules/kwh = 27.78 kwh
1,553.32 kwhr / 24hr = 64.72 kwh per hour
27.78 kwh / 64.72kwh = 0.429 hours

ATMS 120 Online

Snodgrass

A popular movie in the mid-80s, Back to the Future claimed that time travel was possible
through the combination of a Delorean, 88 mph, flux capacitor and a 1.21 jiggawatts of power.
In the movie, Michael J. Fox, needs to get back to the future from 1955 and Doc Brown, played
by Christopher Lloyd, calculates thats a lighting bolt could supply the necessary energy.
Part #3. Given the information below, calculate how many watts of power (1 watt = 1 J/s) are in
a typical strike. Convert your answer to gigawatts (10 9 watts) and compare it to what the
Delorean needs. (You must show your work.)
Needed info:
Energy from a typical strike: 10 billion J (assume all of the energy goes into the flux capacitor)
Time for the return stroke of the lightning to travel between the cloud and the ground = 70 s
(s = micro seconds = millionths of a second = 110-6 sec)
10,000,000,000 J / .00007s = 142,857,142,857,142.9 watts = 142857.14286 Gigawatts
142857.14286 Gigawatts / 1.21 Gigawatts = 118063.75 times the amount the Delorean needs.
You can show all of your work on the back of this page. Just make it clear!