Apparently a single lightning strike contains the equivalent of about 40 gallons of gasoline. It’s very powerful but not that significant on the scale of a whole city.

In fact a quick back of the napkin math suggests it would only power a city of a million people for half a second.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy

Secondary school physics teacher here: The article is conflating power (watt or joule per second) and energy (joule or kilowatt-hour), so any claim they make is nonsense and the article shouldn't be taken seriously. My students make the same mistake all the time but they don't get to publish it :-)

Power is energy per time unit (thus: energy = power x time), so while the power of a lightning strike is very high (~10GW), the overall energy isn't because it only lasts for a very short duration (apparently the duration of a lightning event is hard to define, [1] says about 0,5 seconds, other places mention much shorter durations, ~10us). So if that 10GW lasts for 0,5 seconds, the total energy is 1,4MWh, which is 1/6 to 1/10 of the electrical energy an average American household consumes in a year[2].

[1] https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/16/547/2023/ [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...

That article seems very very wrong. I think they missed the difference between GW and GWh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs28lEq9smw

that article does not make that claim

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