Seems like she's at a construction site, wearing a safety harness.
Oh, I noticed a discussion a few pages back about the Shadow Broker's ship being constrained to Hagalaz-orbit.
Lightning as a power source? First off, lightning strikes carry immense power. However, power is _really_ energy per unit time. I can produce a one million watt laser fairly easily. You just release one joule of energy over one microsecond. Gives you a 1 Megawatt power output. With that in mind, although lightning has a fairly decent energy content, it's almost impossible to use as an effective power source.
The major problem with 'farming' lighting is trying to store the accumulated charge. Lighting strikes are nasty stuff to deal with - extremely high voltage with fairly heavy current behind it. The Broker's ship uses 'lightning capacitors' to store some charge. I suppose that the logical next step would be to release the stored charge, which would produce current (current is charge per unit time). The problem with this is building a capacitor bank that can withstand lighting strikes (just trying to safely conduct lightning to ground is a massive pain in the ass, let alone try and store the energy). Building a capacitor bank to do that is damn near impossible, most dielectrics would just short out and explode under those conditions.
The other problem is that you need a potential difference to get electric current flow. We have a bunch of charge stored up in some magic box. We need to release it so Liara's ship doesn't take a nosedive into Hagalaz. In order to do this, the charge has to be released somewhere. The easiest way to do this would be to fire a laser at the ground, which would cause the atmosphere to ionize, which would provide a conducting path to ground.
The other problem with lightning is that it's totally random. The broker's ship requires X amount of power to maintain its altitude. There is no guarantee that you will get enough lightning hits to maintain a constant power output.
With that in mind, it's much more likely that the weird plate things Liara comments on are a capacitor system for safely storing charge built up by lightning. The lightning capacitors store charge until it can be dumped down to Hagalaz, via laser-induced atmospheric ionization. The ship itself is likely nuclear powered, be that fission, fusion, or some sort of antimatter drive.
Depending on the propulsion systems, the ship may require an atmosphere to function. It's likely that the Broker's ship is propelled by turning atmospheric air into a plasma, then pushing the plasma through a magnetic field. This would be something like a rocket, except it wouldn't require chemical fuel. Of course, it could be air heated directly by some sort of nuclear reaction (there was research done on using fission reactors running at very high temperatures to build a nuclear-powered rocket, however, there were safety concerns with various chemicals in the air being made radioactive via neutron activation).
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