Can we harness the power from lightning

We know that lightning will strike in certain regions of earth regularly and we also know how to induce lightning in weather. So would it be possible to harness this power. For example set up high top receptor points to receive lighting strikes and this electricity is then stepped down via massive transformers and fed into the grid at thousands of voltage bursts ? Would this hypothesis be possible ? Ideas ?

It is possible to harness power from lightning. According to PESWiki, with a system using a Tesla coil and a device to step down the voltage, the electricity from the lightning can be used to perform electrolysis on a large volume of water (usually from a water body such as an ocean). The gas created would be stored then used to produce energy for the grid as it is demanded. Capacitors and flywheels can also be used to store energy. For more information, see the reference cited below.

Perhaps not totally impossible, but certainly impractical, not to mention prohibitively expensive... Consider that lightning is pulsed D.C., which occurs at many hundreds of kilovolts and into the megavolt range, with currents of many tens or hundreds of thousands of amps for a tenth of a second or so. Trying to tame such humongous pulses and turn them in to something that could be fed into the A.C. power grid would be prohibitive.

To tame lightning, first we would have to catch and store the discharges. Theoretically this could be done is a huge capacitor bank. Then we would have to drain it off slowly and either use it to power motors to turn generators, or feed it into inverters to convert it to A.C. to feed the power grid. In either case, compensating for the many variables, especially compensating for the voltage drop as the capacitor bank discharged would be nearly impossible.

I am no expert on this, but I think you would need to have a metal with a low conductivity and high melting point. Lightning fries a lot of the stuff it hits because it has so much power. The thing holding the power hold have to take a lot of electricity without burning up. The metal having a low conductivity would weaken the strength of the electrical flow. This would also increase the heat as that energy needs to go somewhere.

Now that I think of it, why don't we try to recreate the conditions that happen in a storm to get a small scale "storm" and use the lightning.

You would need one HUGE capacitor to store all the energy! But I guess it can be done.

yes and they had top men on it back in the 70's