How many watts are in a bolt of lighting?
Answer:
power is voltage times current ie P=IxE SO if a lightning strike is 150,000 volts even at 1 amp that would be 150,000 watts. so 1.21 Giga Watts is not that unrealistic.
Lightning is very high voltage, but not high current. More like ten (10) watts.
enough to power the whole earth for a long period of time
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lightning)... says:
An average bolt of negative lightning carries an electric current of 40 kA (kiloamperes), although some bolts can be up to 120 kA, and transfers a charge of 5 coulombs and 500 MJ (megajoules), or enough energy to power a 100 watt lightbulb for just under two months. The voltage depends on the length of the bolt: with the dielectric breakdown of air being 3 million volts per meter, this works out at about one billion volts for a 300m (1,000 feet) lightning bolt.
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