harnessing nature’s power: Creating electricity from lightning in ethiopia

“Blow the candle out, dear. It is time to sleep.” 

You might think that this is a statement made by a mother to her child long before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in the 19th century. However, this is the reality to 940 million people in the world today.

55% of the population in Ethiopia (the second most populous country in Africa) have no electrical infrastructure and use wood for food preparation and other household purposes. Most people living in the rural area use fuel for lighting and wood/charcoal for food preparation due to energy poverty. These people are unable to cook with modern cooking devices and lack a bare minimum of electric lighting to read or for other household and productive activities at sunset.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put it this way when explaining the effects of poor electricity in Nigeria:

“I cannot help but wonder how many medical catastrophes have occurred in public hospitals because of “no light,” how much agricultural produce has gone to waste, how many students forced to study in stuffy, hot air have failed exams, and how many small businesses have foundered.”

Energy poverty impacts individuals of the society, regardless of their income. Educational sectors need electric power to deliver courses in a better manner. Students of the rural area want to read different materials, including class activities at night. Most children living in the rural part of Ethiopia are unable to attend the courses delivered in live TV programs (during the COVID-19 pandemic), which has a great impact on the quality of education due to energy poverty.

The lack of electricity also has a strong impact on the health of individuals. Women who use wood and charcoal for food preparation are exposed to different respiratory diseases as compared to those who use electric energy.

The automation of agriculture requires electric power starting from land preparation to the final cultivation of products. Generally, the impact of energy poverty on human resource development, health, and agriculture automation is significant.

The issue of power shortage can be curbed if we are able to diversify our power sources. The most popular power sources like wind and sun cannot be fully relied on because weather is not static. Besides, we need a constant supply of sun and wind for those energy sources to function effectively. Discovering other clean energy sources and using these sources in conjunction will help us to address the electricity shortage issue. One alternative source of clean energy is lightning.

When it comes to lightning, however, it functions with a slightly different principle. We need a single strike, then boom, we can light a 60 watt light bulb for six months.  

Lightning as a power source can also address the problem of power distribution because, unlike hydropower, there is no centralized source. Lightning happens everywhere though some places can receive it more frequently than others. Therefore, this prevents the necessity of very long cables running throughout the country in order to transmit electricity from power stations. For lightning, we can harvest it in a certain location and turn it into use within a short circumference. 

Another advantage of lightning as a power source is that it is a form of clean energy. Therefore it will help with the fight against global warming and climate change. 

For the mentioned reasons, lightning as a power source can be a powerful addition to help solve the global energy crisis.

Is harvesting energy from lightning even possible?

To facilitate the harvesting of lightning, a laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC) could theoretically be used to allow lightning to strike in a predictable location. A high power laser could be used to form an ionized column of gas, which would act as an atmospheric conduit for electrical discharges of lightning, which would direct the lightning to a ground station for harvesting.

Teramobile, an international project initiated jointly by a French-German collaboration of CNRS (France) and DFG (Germany), has managed to trigger electric activity in thunderclouds by ultrashort lasers. A large amount of power is necessary, 5 terawatts, over the short pulse duration. For the moment, the application of laser-channeled lightning is to use energy to divert the lightning and prevent damage instead of harvesting the lightning energy.

Changing this energy into electricity requires a network of equal resistance legs, a network of voltage dividers, to lower the voltage to the point that it can charge capacitors without blowing through the dielectric. It would also require inductors in the divider legs to slow the rise time. The resistance legs would form a web of cables connected to an area network of distributed  spikes, or lightning rods, at one end, and lead to a facility of storage capacitors and voltage regulators and inverters that would bleed the captured energy into the power grid, at the other.

This is just one proposed theory of how to harvest the energy from lightning. However, the scientific community should invest more time and effort to discover the most efficient way to harvest electricity from lightning.

15 years ago, an attempt was made to make this happen:

In the summer of 2007, an alternative energy company called Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc. (AEHI) tested a method for capturing the energy in lightning bolts. The design for the system had been purchased from an Illinois inventor named Steve LeRoy, who had reportedly been able to power a 60-watt light bulb for 20 minutes using the energy captured from a small flash of artificial lightning. The method involved a tower, a means of shunting off a large portion of the incoming energy, and a capacitor to store the rest. According to Donald Gillispie, CEO of AEHI, they "couldn't make it work," although "given enough time and money, you could probably scale this thing up... it's not black magic; it's truly math and science, and it could happen."

Given the very high rate of technological advancement, there are various discoveries that are coming up which can be used in the energy harvest from lightning. For instance, the discovery of Nippon Electric Glass capacitors, with high charge-discharge efficiency at temperatures up to 180 °C, may offer the solution to the commonly posed question of an efficient storage device at high temperature. In the first quarter of 2022, there has been an incredible technological breakthrough where a superconducting power transmission technology promised 0% transmission losses while delivering electricity. This might answer the question of suitable power transmission cables that resist the high surge of power from lightning. 

A single bolt of lightning contains 5 billion joules of energy, enough to power a household for a month. Therefore, lightning as an energy source can contribute to the urgent energy demand in the current world.

The backbone of any scientific research is funding. Funding is required to propagate both the small scale laboratory research and to scale it up to be applicable in real life. Private companies might provide the funds for the research but may not be convinced to do so because there may be no short-term way to monetize it and therefore no immediate payoff. This brings the burden of funding to the government. Research is a cornerstone of the development of a nation. Civilizations bloom because of research that solves practical problems. Besides, there is a significant need for change in this sector. The current solutions proposed to curb the power shortage issue are not as effective as we think they are. This is evident because of the fact that 13% of the world’s population still doesn’t have access to electricity.
Nature has always provided our energy sources: the sun, the wind, the water, the waves - so why not lightning? The more we diversify our energy sources, the easier it gets to solve the global energy crisis.

For centuries, scientists have been fascinated by the idea of harnessing the power of thunderstorms. Nikola Tesla experimented extensively with the topic, but significant understanding of the field of atmospheric electrodynamics has until recently proved elusive.

I strongly believe our recent discoveries and technological advancements will enable us to build a system to find a significant use for lightning. However, nothing of significance is ever accomplished alone. Specialists and subspecialists in the field need to come together and use their knowledge collaboratively in order to build this system. The public should lobby the government to fund research dedicated for this purpose.

Lightning energy is just the beginning. Our current technological advancements will enable us to sustainably use the wonders of nature to benefit mankind without harming the natural environment.

Links used:
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece/2020/7502583/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy
https://wonderfulengineering.com/this-new-electric-cable-made-in-japan-claims-to-have-zero-transmission-loss/
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access#:~:text=work%20on%20Energy-,Summary,cost%20for%20indoor%20air%20pollution.