International Journal for Tourism and Technology (IJTT)
The ever increasing demand for energy has led to the advancement of power supply research into sufficient clean renewable energy sources. This has led to awaking scientific minds into available natural renewable Energy sources around us. One of such sources is lightning energy, which is a very fast electrostatic discharge from Columbus cloud and hence gives off very high intensity flash of light and very loud sound called thunder. It has an enormous amount of energy (about 1 billion watt) and occurs in a fraction of a second. There are some setbacks to harnessing this enormous energy and one is it’s unpredictability nature which was looked into by this paper using lightning occurrence data from John Afa for three locations in Nigeria. The information was analyzed to ascertain the viability of harnessing lightning in these locations and to know the periods / months with low and high probability of catching lightning strike. The three locations were Brass, Bonny island and Port-Harcourt and analysis showed that Brass has the highest probability of harvesting lightning strike with annual periods of high frequency between March and June and between August and November. The months with peak frequency are April, May and October. In conclusion, as lightning frequency varies from different locations, putting a lightning harvesting farm in these locations would increase the possibility of arresting lightning strike.
Over the years, there has always been a need for technological advancement in power generation to meet the ever growing demand. Research is concurrently being carried out for advancement and discoveries of more efficient non-polluting sources of energy, which has led to advancement in renewable energy. There are various source which has fewer research in harnessing due to it characteristics is lightning. Lightning has proven to be an interesting field of study with lots of on going research work. It has been witnessed or seen by all as its effects are felt during thunderstorms. It is initialized in the clouds, specifically a charged cloud (Columbus cloud). Lightning strike is an electrostatic discharge between oppositely charged bodies which gives off a high intensity flash of light and very loud sound called thunder (Rakov, 2013). This could occur between two oppositely charged clouds (intercloud lightning), between oppositely charged regions within a cloud (intracloud) and between cloud and ground/earth-surface (cloud-to-ground lightning). The lightning strike of most interest for harnessing is the cloud to ground (CG). The CG lightning enable a very high energy (about 1
billion watt) to flow between the cloud and ground and this energy can be harnessed and converted for use (Bouquegneau, 2011; Dwyer & Uman, 2014; Rakov & Uman, 2003; Tovar et al., 2014). But the harnessing of this enormous energy has some setbacks and one of which is the focus of this research paper. There is a certain perception that lightning doesn’t strike a particular place twice and this isn’t scientifically proven as this thought is based on the unpredictability characteristics of lightning. Lightning occurrence has proven to be unpredictable in nature, but this can be assisted / handled by prior knowledge of specific areas with high frequency of occurrence to locate or position lightning harvesting farm. This research paper looks into lightning frequency analysis for three locations in Nigeria to determine the viability of harnessing lightning’s energy and appropriate location for a
lightning harvesting farm.
Electrostatic discharge, Lightning energy, conductivity probability