Rigorous Rabbit Holes

Real questions · Researched · Simplified · Animated

Why Don't We Catch Lightning?

Every lightning bolt carries $50 to $250 worth of electricity. So why isn't anyone in the business of catching them?

Published · Watch on YouTube · 16 sources

Correction

  • Oct 21, 2026: An on-screen caption in the Short reads "5× HOTTER THAN THE SUN". The narration says it correctly: five times hotter than the surface of the sun. The sun's core is about 15 million °C, so the caption is wrong as written. We can't re-edit a published Short, so the correction lives here.

The rabbit hole

The extra context that didn't fit in the Short. Little numbers link to the sources below.

Your phone holds more charge than a lightning bolt

This sounds wrong, but it’s true. A normal phone battery holds about 2,000 times more electric charge than a typical lightning stroke 11. And yet one bolt carries enough energy to charge that same phone tens of thousands of times 12.

How can both be true? Think of electricity as water.

  • Your phone is a bathtub: lots of water, barely any pressure (3.85 volts).
  • Lightning is one cup of water through a pressure washer turned up about a million times (around 100 million volts) 13.

Less water, way more force. That’s the problem with catching it: you can’t catch a pressure-washer blast in a bucket. It blasts right past.

Where the money actually goes

The $50 to $250 in a bolt 3 is real, but almost none of it reaches the ground. Air doesn’t conduct electricity, so the bolt spends nearly everything carving a path of plasma through the sky 4. That spending is the flash, the heat and the thunder.

What’s left at the bottom would boil roughly a bucket of water 5. Turn that into electricity with a small steam rig at about 10% efficiency and you get between half a cent and 29 cents per bolt 8. Pennies.

What if we caught every bolt on Earth?

Say you could catch every single flash on the planet, perfectly. That’s about 44 flashes a second. Even then, it would only cover about 1 to 6% of the world’s electricity 14. And that assumes catching the ones inside clouds and over the ocean too, which nobody can reach.

Scientists do catch lightning, on purpose

Researchers in Florida and New Mexico trigger lightning by firing small rockets into storm clouds, trailing a thin copper wire. The bolt follows the wire down, and the wire doesn’t carry it home: it vaporizes 15. If copper wire can’t survive the trip, a battery doesn’t stand a chance.

Norway’s artificial lightning factories

The real money in lightning was never the power. It was the chemistry. Lightning’s heat splits nitrogen out of the air, and rain carries it into the soil as fertilizer 9.

In the early 1900s, Norway copied that. The Birkeland–Eyde process used a giant electromagnet to spread an electric arc into a flat disc of plasma, which fixed nitrogen from plain air 10. The plant at Notodden started on 2 May 1905 with about 100 workers, running on hydropower. It became the company Norsk Hydro and sold “Norwegian saltpeter” fertilizer 16.

The catch: it was hugely energy-hungry, about 15 MWh of electricity for every ton of nitric acid. In the 1910s and 1920s it was replaced by the Haber–Bosch and Ostwald processes 16.

Sources

Every claim in the Short and in this write-up, numbered, with where it comes from. Spot a mistake? Email hello@rigorousrabbitholes.com and we'll fix it in public.

Source being added marks a claim we're still attaching a source to.

  1. A lightning bolt carries roughly 1 to 5 billion joules of energy (about 280 to 1,400 kWh).Wikipedia: Harvesting lightning energyA range of published estimates. Source 2 gives figures in the same range.
  2. The same 1 to 5 billion joule range.UNSW Sydney: Can we store the energy from lightning? (2022)
  3. That's $50 to $250 worth of electricity per bolt.US Energy Information Administration: Short-Term Energy Outlook, electricityOur math: 278 to 1,389 kWh × 18.2¢ per kWh (the 2026 US average home price) ≈ $51 to $253.
  4. Lightning heats its own path into plasma at about 30,000 °C (54,000 °F), about five times hotter than the surface of the sun (about 5,500 °C). Source being addedStandard lightning physics figures, not yet tied to a specific source in our fact-check sheet.
  5. What reaches the bottom would boil about a bucket of water. Source being addedOur math: roughly 0.3 to 16 kWh reaching the ground ÷ 0.72 kWh to boil away one liter ≈ 0.4 to 22 liters.The 0.3 to 16 kWh figure for energy reaching the ground still needs its source attached.
  6. Even the Empire State Building only gets hit about 25 times a year.US National Weather Service, as cited by NYC Emergency Management (nyc.gov thunderstorms page) (link to come)
  7. A bolt arrives in millionths of a second, far too fast for a battery to absorb. Source being addedStandard figure, not yet tied to a specific source in our fact-check sheet.
  8. A small steam rig turns maybe a tenth of the heat into electricity, which makes it pennies per bolt. Source being addedOur math: 0.3 to 16 kWh reaching the ground × about 10% efficiency × $0.18 per kWh ≈ half a cent to 29 cents.Big power plants run at about 35 to 40% efficiency. The efficiency figures still need a source attached.
  9. Lightning's heat splits nitrogen out of the air, and rain carries it into the soil as fertilizer. Source being addedStandard figure, not yet tied to a specific source in our fact-check sheet.
  10. In 1905, Norway built factories that made artificial lightning to make fertilizer from air.Wikipedia: Birkeland–Eyde process; Norsk Hydro company history (link to come)The Birkeland–Eyde process (1903). The Notodden plant started on 2 May 1905.
  11. Your phone holds about 2,000 times more electric charge than a lightning bolt.ATIS: Lightning Parameters for Engineering ApplicationsA 3,000 mAh phone battery holds about 10,800 coulombs; a typical lightning stroke moves about 5.2 coulombs.
  12. Yet one bolt carries enough energy to charge that phone 24,000 to 120,000 times.Our math, from sources 1 and 11: 280 to 1,400 kWh ÷ about 0.0115 kWh per full charge (3,000 mAh × 3.85 V). (link to come)
  13. A bolt pushes at around 100 million volts, versus 3.85 volts for a phone battery. Source being addedOrder-of-magnitude lightning figure, not yet tied to a specific source in our fact-check sheet.
  14. Catching every bolt on Earth, perfectly, would cover only about 1 to 6% of the world's electricity. Source being addedOur math: about 44 flashes per second worldwide (satellite estimate) × 1 to 5 billion joules ≈ 44 to 220 GW, versus about 3,400 GW of average world electricity use.The 44-per-second and 3,400 GW figures still need their sources attached. This assumes catching every flash, including those inside clouds and over the ocean.
  15. Scientists trigger lightning on purpose by firing small rockets trailing thin copper wire; the bolt vaporizes the wire.Big Think (link to come)The rockets climb about 1,000 feet. This is done for research in Florida and New Mexico.
  16. The Notodden plant had about 100 workers, ran on hydropower, grew into Norsk Hydro and made "Norwegian saltpeter"; it was replaced in the 1910s and 1920s by the Haber–Bosch and Ostwald processes.Wikipedia: Birkeland–Eyde process; Norsk Hydro company history (link to come)The arc process used about 15 MWh of electricity per ton of nitric acid.