[paul.fr]

i can't believe nobody else posted this? So, how many pieces of toast can you make with the energy in a lightning bolt?

[Batroost]

I once heard that a typical lightening discharge contains about the same amount of energy as is used to boil a bath full of water!

So all we need now is a conversion factor from baths to toasts.  []

Or put another way...

Lightening strike, typically, 500 MegaJoules (at least according to Wicki).

Toaster - two slices, let's say 3kW for two minutes = 360kJ

So that's more than 2700 pieces of toast, per bolt!

(This suggests that the bath analogy is out by about a factor of ten - but then I may have remembered in wrong).

[lightarrow]

i can't believe nobody else posted this? So, how many pieces of toast can you make with the energy in a lightening bolt?

Do you get these questions by dreaming in the night? How can you invent all of them? Are you making a sort of "competition" with someone?  []

[paul.fr]

Do you get these questions by dreaming in the night? How can you invent all of them? Are you making a sort of "competition" with someone?  []

hi. this question was asked because in the last NS radio show Chris said pop into the forum where questions such as how many pieces of toast can you make with the energy in a lightening bolt? are asked and answered..and i noticed that this question had not been asked!

[chris]

That's a bit of an under-estimate. A closer number would be about 150,000 pieces of toast per lightning bolt. The energy of each stroke is 1-10 BILLION joules.

I wrote an article about lightning and thunder and whether it could power a town. here's the link:

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/howdothunderstormswork-2/

Chris

[Bored chemist]

If it's 10GJ rather than 0.5GJ then the estimate is out by a factor of 20 so it would be something like 50,000.