Why don’t we use lightning to generate power?

Even though it may seem an interesting idea at first glance, it doesn’t really make sense if taken seriously. The math speaks for itself.

A lightning bolt has an average energy of 1,000,000 Joule.

A serious storm throws about 28 lightning bolts per minute for up to 10 hours. That is a total of:

E=1×109J×28×600 minutes =16.800.000.000.000J

So a storm produces sixteen thousand-eight hundred billion joules of energy with lightning alone, that can provide 4.7Gwh for domestic electric use.

That sounds like a lot of energy, but it is nowhere near enough to how much would really be needed.

Imagine you had a city of 100,000 flats consuming 1Kw of electrical power constantly for 13 hours.

E=1000W×3600s×13h×100,000 =4,700,000,000J

The energy consumption is approximately equivalent to 1.3Gwh. So the previous storm could power this city for roughly 3.6 days.

But how long do we have to wait for a colossal storm like that to show up again in that spot? It could be months, if not even years.

We haven’t even taken into account the energy loss due to inefficient electrical conversion, and the fact that we cannot predict where lightnings will strike the next time.

All of these factors make harvesting lightning for energy production a useless endeavor.