The idea of harnessing a lightning bolt and using the electricity to supplement our power grid has been thought up many times in the past. But knowing when and where lightning will strike, capturing the lightning bolt, finding the right materials that could withstand the sudden surge of electricity and pushing it onto the electrical grid are not easy obstacles to overcome. The amount of power is quiet immense … or is it?

A typical lightning bolt produces about 10,000 amps but some bolts, such as the one that struck the Apollo spacecraft upon liftoff in the 60′s, have measured well over 100,000 amps. Nowadays, there are large capacitors and batteries which could store the huge amounts of electricity a lightning bolt creates, but would it be practical to try and harness it? Surprisingly, no. There is very little power in a lightning bolt when you compare it to how much power we really use in our homes and cities.

There’s no question thunderstorms generate a tremendous amount of electricity. Ironically, when you convert a lightning bolt into watts, an even larger number is produced. But when you convert the lightning into kilowatt-hours (the unit used to measure the power we use in our homes) it’s rather insignificant. In fact, the average lightning bolt contains about 250 kilowatt-hours of electricity. However, the average household uses anywhere from 500 kilowatt-hours to 1500 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. So one average lightning bolt won’t even power the average home for half a month let alone a small town or a large city. In addition, there are a few problems with trying to harness and use the electricity generated by a lightning bolt.

The electricity itself being one of them. Transferring this much electricity in such a short amount of time onto the electrical grid would crush it, causing all sorts of damage and disruptions in service. After all, lightning is what causes many power outages when it strikes power lines or transformers sending a huge amount of electricity onto the grid in an uncontrolled fashion. While not impossible, one would need to come up with a device that could temporarily store the massive amount of electricity, perhaps in huge bank of capacitors and/or batteries capable of an extremely quick charge, and then find some way of slowly trickling the charge onto the power grid so as not to cause a disruption.

While capacitors today can store huge amounts of electricity, most aren’t charged in about 0.2 msec, the time it takes for a lightning bolt to discharge its 1,000,000 kilo-volts of electricity. Conversely, these large capacitors are usually charged “slowly” and then quickly discharged in specialized applications (particle accelerators, lasers, rail guns, etc). If you only captured a portion of the electricity produced by a lightning bolt, then you would need more hits on a collection tower to make up the difference.

Taking this into consideration, one tower isn’t going to cut it. Even if it’s 100 feet tall, that doesn’t guarantee a lightning bolt is going to hit it. You would need many towers stretching 1000 feet or higher spread over a very large area that sees many thunderstorms each year to increase the odds of capturing a lightning strike. Florida would be the most likely location for such a lightning farm. Florida averages the most lightning strikes each year with about 10 strikes per kilometer per year. So, if you have a bunch of towers set up in a 1 kilometer area and these towers were able to attract all 10 of the lightning strikes for the entire year, you would produce enough electricity to power 2 homes for a month. As you can see, it’s simply not economical to build the infrastructure required to capture a lightning bolt, which is why no one has ever tried to commercialize lightning as a source of electricity.