This question comes from Trevor, who asks: if all the lightning that occurs worldwide on any given day all struck the same place at once, what would happen to that place?

They say lightning never strikes in the same place twice. "They" are wrong.

It's a little surprising that this saying has survived; you'd think that people who believed it would have been gradually filtered out.

People often wonder whether we could harvest electrical power from lightning.

On the face of it, it makes sense; after all, lightning is electricity, and lightning strikes seem pretty powerful.

The problem is, a lightning strike is over so fast the total amount of energy delivered isn't THAT extreme, and in any case it's very hard to get lighting to strike where you want it.

A typical lightning strike delivers enough energy to power a residential house for about two days.

That means that even the Empire State building, which is struck by lightning about 100 times a year, wouldn't be able to keep a house running on lightning power alone.

Even in regions of the world with a lot of lightning, such as Florida and the eastern Congo rainforest, the power delivered to the ground by sunlight outweighs the power delivered by lightning by a factor of a million.

This makes sense, because ultimately lightning is powered by sunlight.