The energy involved is reasonably modest, on the order of 108J, equivalent to about 30kWh. An average household these days eats a little under 30kWh (which is a lot, by the way, 5 times more than about 3 decades ago). A lightning discharge would supply a home for maybe a day (these days, or maybe 8-15 homes for a day in 1965). With thousands of discharges, that'd neatly be thousands of homes... for a day.
Can't be right at all. Photo flash capacitors store hundreds of joules, and if you short them out all you get is a fairly exciting *pow*. Lightning strikes light trees on fire, melt sand, vaporize metal..
So an average lightning bolt is a gigajoule or so. These aren’t average lightning bolts.
And OP’s comparison point of the energy used by a house in a day seems arbitrary when we are talking about an event that lasts seconds.
If your 30kWh number is reasonable for a house’s daily energy usage, in the 17 second duration of this record breaking lightning bolt a house uses about 21 kJ.
So even if the bolt itself only moves that estimated 1gJ of energy, it’s enough electricity to power about 47000 homes for those 17 seconds.
These are not ‘modest’ amounts of energy by any stretch.
There are undoubtedly lots of reasons, but I bet one of them is that air conditioning is much more common and uses a lot of electricity. The US extends much further south than Europe (the states along the US's southern border are at the same latitude as northern Africa) and large sections of the US have hotter summertime temperatures than pretty much anywhere in Europe.
It depends on if the energy consumption figure includes natural gas. It is much more common in the US to use electricity for heating & water heating than it is in europe. Obviously there are other factors but that could explain some of it.
That could explain all of it. Household average here (including 1 person households / apartments etc) is 2479 kwh per year, but also 1169 m3 of natural gas. If you convert that gas to kwh it would be around 10,500 kwh
