# Energy potential in a lightning bolt. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 21, 2007, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/energy-potential-in-a-lightning-bolt/427307 "2007-11-21T11:27:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![kambuckta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/53a042/32.png) [@kambuckta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kambuckta)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/energy-potential-in-a-lightning-bolt/427307/1 "2007-11-21T11:27:35Z")
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. ?? ---
**Author:** ![Nametag](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nametag/32/406_2.png) [@Nametag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nametag)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 11:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/energy-potential-in-a-lightning-bolt/427307/2 "2007-11-21T11:45:22Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![j\_sum1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/8baadc/32.png) [@j\_sum1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/j_sum1)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/energy-potential-in-a-lightning-bolt/427307/3 "2007-11-21T14:55:36Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/energy-potential-in-a-lightning-bolt/427307/4 "2007-11-21T15:23:30Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Gfactor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/energy-potential-in-a-lightning-bolt/427307/5 "2007-11-21T15:44:07Z")
> [@](#): > > The energy liberated by lightning is indeed impressive. For example, during one lightning strike, tens of thousands of amps of electrical current flow between hundreds of millions of volts, releasing several billion joules of energy in just a fraction of a second. Furthermore, there are about four million lightning strikes on our planet every single day, resulting in a total worldwide power of more than 100 billion watts. If this large amount of energy could somehow be harnessed it would supply a significant fraction of the power needs of the United States. > > Unfortunately, lightning strikes are also distributed over a very large area, and the density of strikes at any one location is relatively small. At our 250-acre lightning center in north-central Florida, we get about six natural lightning strikes per year. Using rockets trailing wires we can trigger an additional dozen or so. The result is that even on a pretty big piece of land in the lightning capital of the United States the energy of the lightning would only power a few 100-watt light bulbs—and that assumes that somehow we could extract all the energy out of the lightning, which would be nearly impossible. To put this in perspective, if all the solar energy that falls upon the same area were captured then it would power several million 100-watt light bulbs. As a result, despite its impressive show of power, lightning is not in fact a practical source of energy. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/02-ask.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/02-ask.html)