Is there a way to harness electricity from lightning?

Sure, it’s possible. But it might not be worth it…

By Sarah Jensen

“Benjamin Franklin was really lucky his kite wasn’t struck by lightning,” says James Kirtley, MIT professor of electrical engineering and a specialist in electric machinery and power systems. The average lightning strike contains about 1 million joules, enough energy to fry the founding father in his boots. “The typical house in the U.S. has 100 amp service or about 28 horsepower,” says Kirtley. Unfortunately, relying on lightning bolts to power our hair dryers, TVs, and refrigerators would be far from cost-effective. The problem is that the energy in lightning is contained in a very short period, only a few microseconds. Further, to obtain that 1 million joule, one would have to handle a voltage of several million volts.

Kirtley explains that absorbing lightning and converting it to useful energy would be an extraordinary challenge. It would require complex capture and storage facilities and distribution systems that, in the end, would unlikely yield enough energy to justify their expense. Attracting a lightning bolt would take much more sophisticated equipment than an iron key at the end of a silk string. Tall metallic rods extending high above the ground would do the trick, drawing any electrical charges in the atmosphere and directing them into a facility. But robust and dependable safety mechanisms would also need to be built to immediately contain the huge burst of energy and prevent the entire facility from being blown to bits.

And because you never know if an upcoming lightning strike will carry a positive or negative charge, capacitors and rectifiers would also be necessary to equalize the currents of incoming strikes. “You’d need some sort of mechanism to make sure the positive charge of one bolt didn’t cancel out the negative charge of another,” Kirtley explains. In addition, determining the most practical locations for capture facilities would present many problems. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, lightning strikes somewhere on the earth approximately 44 times every second, but most of those strikes occur in the tropics and remote mountain regions. Constructing a state-of-the-art energy conversion and storage facility in such conditions would be enormously difficult. Distributing that energy to more populated areas would add more logistic and economic challenges.

Kirtley remains hopeful that the challenges of lightning capture — if not its economic feasibility — will one day be met. “Just because we don’t harness lightning now doesn’t mean some smart engineer out there won’t someday figure out how to do it,” he says. But even at 1 million joules, the typical lightning strike contains only about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power, which is insufficient to make much difference on our electric bill. “We currently buy electricity at the cost of about 20 cents a kWh,” he says. “The amount of energy from a lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel.”

From a practical point of view, in a reasonable time perspective, it is not possible to achieve this objective.

Harnessing energy from lightning is a challenging task due to its unpredictable nature and high voltage. Some of the most promising techniques to capture lightning energy include using supercapacitors, creating tesla towers, and designing lightning rods that convert the energy into electricity.

Supercapacitors can store the electrical energy generated by lightning, and it can be used later to power devices or appliances. Tesla towers are tall structures that use the same principles as a lightning rod to capture energy from the air. Lightning rods can also convert the energy from lightning strikes into usable electricity, although this technology is still in development.

Lightning energy can be considered a form of renewable energy since it is generated by natural processes, but it is not yet a viable source of energy due to the difficulties in capturing and storing it. However, with continued research and development, it may become a more feasible option in the future.