How much lightning can the earth store

While lightning holds immense energy, technical constraints and safety considerations have been hurdles for practical applications. A single bolt of lightning contains 5 billion joules of energy, enough to power a household for a month. The energy of a thunderstorm equals that of an atom bomb.

Since the late 1980s, there have been several attempts to investigate the possibility of harvesting lightning energy. A single bolt of lightning carries a relatively large amount of energy (approximately 5 gigajoules or about the energy stored in 38 Imperial gallons or 172 litres of gasoline).

“The challenge of capturing energy from lightning is that while there may be a billion joules of energy, it's mainly being used up in the lightning strike itself,” he says. “The bright light and the loud thunder that humans observe is most of the energy being used up – so in some respects, it's a little too late by the time it hits the ground.

Every second of the day, Mother Nature puts on a spectacular show with an average of around 100 lightning bolts striking the Earth's surface. That is an amazing 8.6 million strikes every single day, with each strike discharging up to one billion Joules of electrostatically stored energy, enough energy to boil the water in 3000 kitchen kettles.

Storing lightning's electricity is the most difficult part, not only because the energy storage industry is still in its infancy, but because the storage devices themselves will need to withstand a massive single bolt of electricity without damaging the device.

Frequency of lightning across the planet (NASA Earth Observatory) An average bolt of lightning, striking from cloud to ground, contains roughly one billion (1,000,000,000) joules of energy. This is no small amount, enough to power a 60-watt lightbulb for six months plus a forgotten open door refrigerator for a day.