This [1] article claims that the electricity from 115 strikes could power the entire US grid for a year, but it's surely napkin math. Awesome tech, though!
[1] https://www.treehugger.com/how-much-energy-is-in-lightning-8...
[1] https://www.treehugger.com/how-much-energy-is-in-lightning-8...
In fact a quick back of the napkin math suggests it would only power a city of a million people for half a second.
Back of the napkin math suggests that even with theoretically perfect prediction, capture, storage and distribution you’d still get at best ~1% of the US’ energy through lightning capture.
Recontextualise it as harvesting electrostatic potential from the atmosphere and you see that potential is driven by the Sun.
Power is energy per time unit (thus: energy = power x time), so while the power of a lightning strike is very high (~10GW), the overall energy isn't because it only lasts for a very short duration (apparently the duration of a lightning event is hard to define, [1] says about 0,5 seconds, other places mention much shorter durations, ~10us). So if that 10GW lasts for 0,5 seconds, the total energy is 1,4MWh, which is 1/6 to 1/10 of the electrical energy an average American household consumes in a year[2].
[1] https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/16/547/2023/ [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Right at the bottom under Frequently Asked Questions:
How much lightning would we need to capture to power the entire U.S. electricity grid?
Merely capturing the energy from 115 lightning strikes would supply all of the U.S.'s annual electricity needs.I think we'd have a very different relationship to lightning if each of them were 2200 nuke's worth of energy.
Incidentally, this puts the US electrical power generation per year at 250,000 bombs/year, which is an intriguing way of looking at it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=4178%20terawatt%20hour...
[3]: https://www.justintools.com/unit-conversion/energy.php?k1=hi...