Remember how hard it was to capture a lightning bolt in Back to the Future movie? The only reason they succeeded was because they knew when and where lightning will strike in a week and they timed it out perfectly.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Unless you can control the weather which if it was possible, would likely take lots of energy ans is the only way to make a "lightning power plant" to my understanding.
Lightning has a peak power of 1TW for 30 microseconds according to Wikipedia, corresponding to an energy content of about 8000 Watt-hours. That is enough to run a 100 watt conventional light bulb for 80 hours, so not actually much energy. You would need to capture about half a million lightning strikes a second if you wanted to power the world that way, for example.
I thought a bolt of lightning can produce 1.21 gigawatts? Doc Brown said this in Back to the Future movie.