So…What happens?

Unfortunately for humans, this would not be nearly enough energy to sustain our global energy consumption as it currently stands, equaling out to be around 2.14% of current global consumption.

Lightning puts on an incredible show, but it has much less energy than you would think. Although 1,000,000,000 Joules is a massive amount of energy, that is 8.25 gallons of gas, not even enough to fill up the tank of most cars. Lightning appears so luminous due to its power, which is producing the same power output at five large nuclear power plants in just .2 seconds. It’s maximum power is astronomically great at 1-3 terawatts, though this is only maintained for tiny fractions of a microsecond. This massive electrical discharge is packed into a very small column of air, which sends out quite a large amount of photons that overwhelm your eyes, creating that bright flash you see. If lightning discharged over a greater amount of time, it would produce much less power and not be as luminous as it appears.

So what does this mean for us? Well with our new source of energy I would like to say that we would replace 5% of our non-renewable fossil fuel sources of energy, but that would likely not be the case. A decent chunk of renewable sources (which take up around 7 percent of energy output) would probably get replaced instead, as our economy values these fossil fuels much more than they do the renewable ones unfortunately. That being said, there’s no telling what would really change as a result of this simply because the energy is not substantial enough to cause anything major.