Harnessing thunder lightning for power to charge our phones and other devices

I want to start by asking if the above topic or the thought of it has ever crossed your mind as a science student or as a techy savvy individual. 

If it has not come to your mind before or you think it can never be possible to harness the power from thunder lightning to charge our devices, then I want you to think again, because researchers on that have even gone far in that and have even made a breakthrough in some form.

As a believer, we often say with God all things are possible, some of the techy savvy individuals will also want to say that with technology, all things are possible, but that is by the way.

The other time, I talked about the solar-race car built by Australian students but this particular one is coming from a group of scientist from the university of Southampton England and they have even gone ahead to partner Nokia to prove that lightning energy could be harnessed and used to power our different devices, and they even went ahead to use it to charge a Nokia Lumia 925 phone with what they were able to come up with at the initial stage of the research.

My guess is that the question or imagination going through your mind now is how they were able to achieve that by harnessing the gargantuan voltage produced by lightning and also owing to the instability and unpredictability that is often associated with lightning.

Here is how they were able to achieve that. Since we all know that power has always remained one of the key requirements to all technology, this group of scientist took to their heels and went to work to demonstrate how possible that could be done. 

What they did was that they were able to simulate lightning with a transformer whereby a high voltage of about 200,000 volts similar to the voltage that lightning will produce was sent across a 300mm gap, where the energy was captured in another transformer and was used to charge a Nokia Lumia 925 phone.

Let me give you an insight of what 200,000 volts it. 

Down here, the AC voltage supplied to our various homes by Power holding companies that we use in running our different appliances is about 220 to 240 volts. 

Then the high tension overhead cables that we always hear about and that is very dangerous is carrying about 11,000 volts of electricity which is being step down to the 220 volts that is usually supplied to our various homes. 

Then here we are talking about a voltage of 200,000 volts, the difference is clear and one could only but imagine how massive such and amount of voltage is.

With the above research on-going, they were able to prove the possibility of harnessing lightning power, and we all know that power is one of the major challenges facing all device development. If we could only imagine a scenario where there is no issue of power or where the issue of power have been totally taken care of in device manufacturing, if so, then all that will be left for us is to see and measure how powerful these devices will tend to be, because surely almost everything pertaining the device will be highly improved.