About 1.4 billion lightning strikes occur around the world each year — if we could harness them, it would meet roughly 1.5 percent of current global energy consumption. But that’s one of the goals of a new, and very unique-looking, drone from Japanese telecom company NTT.
NTT’s researchers were looking for a way to protect their infrastructure from dangerous lightning strikes when they got the idea to put a drone inside a Faraday cage. The lightning-resistant cage can direct the flow of energy from a lightning strike when it hits the drone, with the help of some attached lightning rods. The drone was attached to a 984-foot-long conductive ground wire with a high-voltage switch at the other end.
The team sent the drone into the air during a thunderstorm once ground-level electric field measurements indicated lightning was likely. After hovering with the ground wire switched off for a bit, a large difference in charge had built up between the drone and the grounded wire. So when they flipped the switch, powerful electrical field fluctuations occurred around the drone and triggered a lightning strike to it. The Faraday cage was partially melted, but the drone stayed aloft throughout the whole experience, making it an overall success. The team hopes to continue to develop the technology to create a mobile solution that can be deployed during thunderstorms to direct lightning strikes away from critical infrastructure — and maybe one day even collect and store the lightning’s energy for future use.
