Can you power anything with a lightning bolt?

Absolutely. The mystery is trying to predict where the lightning is going to hit. Lightning is 1,000,000 V of a power spike and if you can capture it either in a coil or someone similar, you can manipulate it to put it to work for you somehow. Lightning is a DC current spike of the immense magnitude. read more

A technology capable of harvesting lightning energy would need to be able to rapidly capture the high power involved in a lightning bolt. Several schemes have been proposed, but the ever-changing energy involved in each lightning bolt renders lightning power harvesting from ground-based rods impractical – too high, it will damage the storage, too low and it may not work. read more

Assuming that you are lucky and get a lightning bolt to hit your conductor, there would be major difficulties in storing the energy and then converting it to alternating current so it can run your appliances. read more