There’s a retired astronaut whose entire post-NASA career has been devoted to developing a plasma propulsion engine. Which is kind of (though not exactly) what you’re thinking of.

Lightning has a peak power of 1TW for 30 microseconds according to Wikipedia, corresponding to an energy content of about 8000 Watt-hours. That is enough to run a 100 watt conventional light bulb for 80 hours, so not actually much energy. You would need to capture about half a million lightning strikes a second if you wanted to power the world that way, for example.