EDIT: This information pertains mostly to Level 80 numbers. More accurate information about level 85 mechanics are located in the Elemental thread.
I did some modeling and math to decide how many stacks of Lightning Shield you should preemptively discharge with an Earth Shock before the ES cooldown would interfere with reapplying FS.
BLUF: It is always a DPS loss not to do this (e.g. to only discharge at a full 9 stacks,) and it is always a DPS loss to ES with only 4 charges. Other than that, it depends on haste and spell damage. Plug your stuff into the spreadsheet, find the line that correlates to your number of LB casts per lockout, pick the charge number that has the greenest number. Never go into a lockout period with that number or more charges on LS.
The excel can be found here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/431943997/Fulminate.xlsx.
Boxes with bold borders are designed to be played with. Sorry; it's an ugly, ugly spreadsheet.
It models DPS loss based on the minimum number of charges you will discharge preemptively. To determine what your "magic number" is, plug your haste in, and a number that is representative of a non-crit LB and one of a non-crit LS charge. These numbers don't have to be especially accurate.
Every time you discharge at less than 9 charges, you incur a DPS loss of [LB Damage]*(9-[number of charges])/([LB Cast Speed]/[ES Global Cooldown]*6)
Every time you cast LB, and would have gained a charge, but are capped at 9, you incur a DPS loss equal [LS Charge Damage].
If you decide to always discharge at X or more charges before entering a lockout period (defined as twice your shock cooldown - the time in which ES would interfere w/ FS + the cooldown after FS is cast,) then we would total the probabilty and magnatude of both scenarios to get a theoretical "DPS loss." As there would be no way to get that number to 0, it's simply a hypothetical reference number. The lower the number, the better.
It's not a perfect model - it doesn't factor in how your decision point will affect the likely number of charges you have right before a lockout period, for example - but since our output is a whole number between 4 and 8, we're more interested in trends than exact numbers. When I play with the numbers in the spreadsheet, I see the following effects:
-The number of LB casts you get in during the lockout period is the most significant factor in determining where your decision point is. As you gain haste, the decision point drops, down to 5 charges when approaching the haste soft cap.
-Increases in overall dps do not affect your decision point - but increases in the LB:LS damage ratio do. This scaling will occur due to talents and specialization passives that affect LB but not LS, and of course Elemental Overload. EO is also not factored into this spreadsheet, but if you want to include it multiply your typical LB by (1+([EO chance]*.75). Increases in the ratio push you to a higher decision point, but it isn't until a stupidly high ratio of around 15:1 that it changes the basic premise of "discharge preemptively." At that point premptively discharging is always a dps loss - only discharge at 9 stacks. The more haste you have, the lower your ratio would need to be. With no haste, it is 24:1. At haste soft cap, it's 48:1. I don't think those ratios are possible, so I'm comfortable saying we'll always be concerned with preemptive discharges.
EDIT: I fixed the spreadsheet to unstupid one calculation. I was modeling ES's cooldown to be reduced by Reverberation. I played with it; it didn't affect any of my conclusions.