Power quality data compression is an important step in the detection and identification of power quality problems. Its essence is the process of exploring power quality sparse features. Aiming at the problem that the matching pursuit algorithm commonly used in sparse decomposition cannot meet the real-time requirement of power signal analysis because of its high computational complexity and long time-consuming in matching the best atom, a lightning search matching and tracing algorithm is proposed by applying the lightning search algorithm with high convergence precision, fast convergence speed and strong global search ability to search the best atom. The proposed algorithm is used to decompose the power quality signal into atoms and extract the characteristic parameters of power quality, and the extracted parameters are used as the compressed power quality data, realization of power quality data compression. The experimental results show that the time of the proposed algorithm to match the best atom is reduced to 1 / 98 of the original algorithm, and the power quality data compression method based on the proposed algorithm meets the real-time requirement of power signal analysis when the best atom is matched, with high compression ratio and low reconstruction error, the performance of data compression is improved.