"Watts" is not a quantity of energy. It's a rate at which energy flows in or out,
changes from one form to another, or moves from one place to another.
200,000 watts is about the same rate of energy transfer as
-- a 220-lb man being lifted straight up in an elevator, or falling from an airplane,
at 207 miles per hour ! Apollo or Shuttle astronauts probably did this.
-- eating 4.13 million Calories in a day ! Certainly nobody ever did this.
-- pulling the plug on the world's biggest Christmas tree ... the one with
2,000 hundred-watt light bulbs in it ... and then running the exact same
amount of electricity through your body ! Not a smart idea.
(A thought: In order to supply 200,000 watts from a standard household outlet
at 117 VAC, you'd need to draw 1,709 Amps. Ignore, for a moment, the fact that
you would blow not only the main fuses in your house but probably also the pole-
transformer that's supplying your entire block. It's useful to recognize that this
amount of current is far exceeded in the channel of a lightning bolt ... not for long,
but definitely by a bunch ... and when that channel includes a human being, it's
always fatal, with no question.)
http://archive.audubonmagazine.org/truenature/truenature0105.html
A wildfire is born when lightning strikes any flammable natural fuel, from a long-dead tree to a bunch of dry grasses. Up to a trillion watts of energy zap the contact point in multiple strokes, all in the space of a thousandth of a second. The energy is released as heat, generating temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and igniting whatever the lightning hits. What happens next depends on a host of factors, including the location of the lightning strike, the weather, the surrounding landscape, and the abundance, size, and flammability of nearby fuels. Like snowflakes, no two wildfires are the same. Change just one factor, and the fire's behavior may alter dramatically.
Take two lightning strikes from a summer thunderstorm. One strike zaps a long-dead snag, causing a curl of smoke to rise from its dry base. Eventually, small flames appear and begin creeping along the ground, burning the sparse cover of organic "litter"--dead leaves, twigs, branches, pinecones, and the other plant and animal detritus. This fire smolders for months, never rising off the ground. When the rain or snow of fall smothers its flames, the fire has burned an area of about two acres.
The other lightning strike hits a live tree, instantly superheating its sap. The sap expands and detonates the trunk, hurling firewood-size chunks of burning wood tens of feet to ignite tall clumps of dry grass. Fanned by a sharp downward gust of air from the thundercloud, the flames blow into a nearby stand of trees, leap to the crowns of the larger trees, and roar through the forest, charring some 20,000 acres.