patherlord

The misunderstandings of safety earthing ,bonding and earthing for lightning is scary. Lightning earthing is also part science and black art 🙂
1.The lightning incused spikes are a high frequency Voltage spike  that travel on the conductors ( Neutral , Live , Earth - it does not care ) towards your precious inverter - and it will also do so on your DC wires . At  a reflection point on the line it will reflect and effectively double up and can spark over at such a point . It is why you see arcing horns sometimes on overhead lines and the good munics will install surge arrestors on the incoming lines at the supply transformer. In the high voltage case you also will then have the 50hz power going to ground at such a breakdown point and effectively creating a short circuit that the upstream breakers must clear . That can cause damage as the time could be long before the breaker operates .(Long is also relative as this would be a few cycles for the breaker to operate vs the lightning induced spike timeline.    Suffice to say you want all your equipment to rise together on this voltage so that the differencial between the equipment don't exceed the equipment rating .  So add as many earths as you can, connect them together and add surge arrestors on your incoming feeds . And buy insurance. Some connections I have seen would not have helped in a lightning strike but at least would satisfy the insurance guy that you had an earth as required . 
2.Bonding is there that you are not the earth conductor that closes the loop in case there is a live wire touching exposed metal .
3. Safety earthing is there to ensure that your earth leakage works properly in case of any current (more than 25mA)returning on the earth wire. 
Earthing is a very interesting subject and can be confusing to people . 
Hope this helps 
 
 
 

My son designed for me; he is an IT "boffin" --- I'm BC "before computers" all I know is that he used Modbus protocol to retrieve all the data from both the inverter as well as the battery. all this information it's archived in our home server in case of some warranty issues with the OEM of my equipment. My system has been running for 15 months and I have all the data archived.