Years, and I mean MANY years ago (maybe 20 or so), I recall some boffin making the claim that the energy available in your average lightning strike would be enough to power the whole of a small country (at that time, Australia) for a period of 12 months or so.
During a period of absolute and utter boredom at work today, the notion came back to me …and I’m wondering whether I was mis-remembering the details of the claim, or whether there is any way of calculating the energy potential of a lightning bolt, and whether nowadays there are any new fangled ways of harnessing that energy, or whether the whole thing was bullshit from the start.
Nonsense. An average household consumes 1-2 billion joules of energy per month. An average lightning strike delivers 1-10 billion joules, 99% of which is dissipated as heat & light.
I thought the numbers were a bit better than that. The trick of course is harnessing the jolly thing. If you can do that, then yoiu are a rich man – even on the pessimistic numbers. There’s an awful lot of lightning around.
The devil’s in the details, of course. On the numbers given above, you’re talking about a lightning strike every day and a half just to run a single household, and whatever you’re catching the lightning in needs to stand up to absurdly high currents and voltages for a very short time, and then let the energy out in a nice controlled fashion. Get yourself a conurbation with a mere 10,000 homes and you need two hundred thousand lightning strikes a month to keep everything running, too. There may be a lot of lightning about the place, but this is starting to sound optimistic.