Comment by myrmidon

This is never going to be economical.

Lightning is ~5GJ per strike. That means you'd need ~4 lighning strikes per hour just to keep up with a single large offshore wind turbine (15MW with 40% capacity factor).

There is also no realistic way to scale the whole thing up to significant levels of power; with the wind turbines, you just build several hundred to get into the GW range. There's simply not enough lighning to achieve that.

And the whole power buffering infrastructure that you would need would be an underutilized waste of (expensive) components.

There's never been any serious attempt at harvesting lightning at scale because a single glance at the numbers reveals how (economically) pointless an exercise it is.