Can the lightning be harnessed?

Every second of a day more than a hundred lightning bolts strike the earth. Thats about ten million lightning bolts in a day. We have had thunderstorms almost since the world began. And yet, common as it is, lightning is perhaps the most misunderstood phenomenon of nature. Today lightning is considered is to be a transient high current electrical discharge having path lengths in kilometers. Lightning plays significant role in natural balance by determining the composition of trees and plants in most of the worlds forests as it is the cause of fire in the forests. According to Love (1970) frequent fires kept the California forest floor clean. Lightning strikes preferentially the taller trees and maintain balance between taller pines and the smaller oaks, which without lightning predator would be shaded from sunlight and die out (Komarek, 1968, 1973). Lightning produces many chemicals including nitrogen that would otherwise not be present in the atmosphere in such abundance at least (Von Liebig, 1827; Chameides et al. 1977; Levine et al. 1984). Thunderstorms and lightning play a role in maintaining fair weather electric field 100 V/m pointing downward. This is due to negative charge about 106 C on the earth and equal amount of positive charge distributed throughout the atmosphere (Pierce, 1974).

Atmospheric currents of the order of 1000 A continuously deplete this charge. This loss of charge is replenished by thunderstorms including lightning acting as a battery to maintain the fair weather electric field (Chalmer, 1976; Uman, 1974; Tzur and Roble, 1985). A variety of effects in the ionosphere and magnetosphere are produced by lightning (Kelly et al. 1984; Carpanter et al. 1984; Goldberg et al. 1986). Whistlers, a part of electromagnetic radiation by lightning, induce precipitation of electrons in the magnetosphere (Inan et al. 1985; Voss et al. 1984).

Lightning is one of the most beautiful displays in nature. It is also one of the most deadly natural phenomena known to man, with bolt temperature hotter than the surface of the sun and shockwaves beaming out in all directions. Lightning causes death and injury to the people and animals. Lightning kills more people than either Tornadoes or Hurricanes. Lightning injures hundreds of people each year, leaving some with Devastating life long neurological injuries. It damages and destructs the ground based structures and air-borne vehicles, disturbs power and communication lines, damages the sophisticated electronic equipments. As this entire fascinating constructive and destructive phenomenon reveal the presence of huge energy in lightning. Each cloud-to-ground lightning involves energy of about 1010 Joules and for about 100 flashes per sec world wide, the power available would be about 1012 Watt. Since the late 1980s there have been

several attempts to investigate the possibility of harnessing energy from lightning. The idea of harnessing lightning and using its electricity to supplement our power grid has been thought up many times in the past. But knowing when and where lightning will strike, capturing the lightning bolt, finding the right materials that could withstand the sudden surge of electricity and pushing it onto the electrical grid are not easy obstacles to overcome. It has been proposed that the energy contained in lightning be used to generate hydrogen from water, or to harness the energy from rapid heating of water due to lightning. People have considered harnessing lightning for electrical power, but there are various reasons due to which, its very difficult to harness lightning. Mainly three problems make it impossible to tap this huge power of lightning. 1. most of the power in lightning is dissipated as thunder and light, which can not be easily harnessed to generate electrical power.
2.

The power associated with a lightning flash is very high, but it is released in pulses of very short duration (of the order of 10-4 - 10-5 s). As a result, the lightning energy, the integral of the power over the short period of time, is moderate, comparable to the monthly energy consumption, 360 kilowatt hours, of five 100 W light bulbs.

3.

Not all the lightning energy in a flash is delivered to the strike point. Using a typical value of energy per unit resistance (action integral) of 105 A-s2 determined from measurements of the current at the negative lightning channel

base and an assumed range of resistance at the strike point of 10 to 100 , we estimated the range of the lightning energy delivered to the strike point to be from 106 to 107 J, which is only 10-2 to 10-4 of the total energy.
4.

The capturing of a sufficiently large number of lightning strikes would require the use of a large number of tall towers. Even if it is 100 feet tall, that does not guarantee a lightning bolt is going to hit it. We would need many towers stretching 1000 feet or higher spread over a very large area that sees many thunderstorms each year to increase the odds of capturing a lightning strike.

5.

The huge surge of electrical current over very brief times makes storing the energy impractical. While capacitors today can store huge amount of electricity, most are not charged in about 0.2 msec, the time it takes for a lightning bolt to discharge its 1,000,000 kilovolts of electricity. Conversely, these large capacitors are usually charged slowly and then quickly discharged in specialized applications (particle accelerators, lasers, rail guns, etc). if we only capture a portion of the electricity produced by a lightning bolt, then we would need more hits on a collection tower to make up the difference.

6.

Lightning strikes to specific locations are infrequent and in consistent. This makes impractical.

7.

Lightning can be very damaging. The collection systems have to be incredibly robust, which would drive up costs. Lightning is also very dangerous, making it tough on the collection.