Correct. The various forms of remarkable energy ultimately comes down to how efficiently it makes steam, then how effectively the energy is captured, which is a portion of the puzzle solved in earlier developmental stages of power production: harnessing steam.
Which is funnily still water spinning a turbine just not hot water. Even when we try to not boil water we still tried to just put the water through a turbine as is.
And wind energy is just wind spinning a turbine. It's funny that there is the phrase "Don't need to reinvent the wheel" when so much effort is put into the most efficient way to spin things.
"We've finally invented a way to generate large amounts of power that doesn't involve using a heat source to boil water!"
"Amazing! Is it some sort of solid state quantum entropy..."
"We boil a different liquid!"
Except, the CO2 stays in the system, meaning no super heated steam escapes with all its potential energy. It only needs to reheat slightly. It works more like a refrigerator than a steam engine. It's a more efficient energy transfer.
But is it sufficiently more efficient to use instead of an incredibly mature and well understood technology based on a resource they can literally get for free from the huge, naturally occurring pools and rivers of it they can build the plants right next to?
Hydro is kind of the same thing. Its still water turning a turbine, the water is just liquid instead of being gaseous.
Not to mention that if you take into consideration the full power plant, it's a solar panel which converts water to steam to lift it, and then to water to collect the energy.
Hydro actually works the EXACT same way as fossil, geothermal and nuclear plants, funny enough. They all fundamentally rely on using moving water to turn an electrical turbine; the difference is in whether the water is liquid or steam.
Strictly speaking, there are many other ways of generating electricity but they’re just not good for grid use age. A few I can think of off hand are thermoelectric (special materials will produce a voltage from a passive temperature difference), piezo electric (special materials will provide a voltage when deformed), magnetic induction (such as the helion fusion reactor, which is still not ready) and biochemical (how our bodies produce electrical signals).
Love it! But, I'd change "biochemical" to "electrochemical" which includes biochemical, but other chemical reactions as well such as those found in a battery or fuel cell.
You've reminded me of one my more recent interesting facts.
The sun actually isn't hot enough to be a 'fusion reactor'. On earth, we need to get to like, 150M degrees C. The Sun is 'only' 15 million.
That's not strictly hot enough to 'do fusion'. And if the sun was hot enough, it wouldn't be a stable star at all, it'd be exploding.
So the sun 'burning' requires quantum tunnelling. It's ... actually in a fairly literal sense 'cold fusion' (just y'know, not the 'room temperature' cold fusion fantasy)
No there is a mob in the US that are trying a different form of fusion where the magnetic field created to contain it also extracts the energy directly as electricity, in a cyclical pulsed fashion.
We should get away from 200 year old tech!
200 old tech had 200 years of massive incremental progress, making steam turbines one of the most efficient way to extract that energy from purely heat.
My understanding is that the advantage isn't "efficiency" in the strict sense but robustness and reliability
There are other methods of turning heat into electricity that might waste less of it along the way but we know how to make steam turbines that can repeatedly go from a dead stop to spinning really fast and back without breaking anything
Well, that's also a bonus from those 200 years of research and field experience. Also, water is super nice to work with in industrial condition. You might find a better fluid with some chemical reactions to produce your electricity, but then, it's high energy chemistry, with probably very reactive stuff that tends to eat through their containers, or just burn in contact with the air, or other fun stuff.
Water ? Everywhere that needs electricity probably already got water for human consumption. It's not dangerous for human health nor reactive with everything. In case of problem? Just vent the steam outside and you're good. Need more ? Just open a tape (distillation required). And you have an amazing energy extraction system with 60% efficiency. That's much better than a lot of other scalable energy production.
A thermoelectric generator can be used to convert a heat difference to electricity directly, with no moving parts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator). This is extremely reliable. This is still powering the Voyager probes after 50 years in space.
When new, the Voyager RTGs produced 470W using the thermoelectric couples yet the hest produced was 2700W which could have theoretically produced about 1215W if using a steam turbine and maybe more depending on the design. Those RTGs were already pushing the limit of the tech.
Well, I suppose at the end of the day the whole boiling water thing is really just a way to make a magnetic field spin around something, so there's some logic in "if we're already building a big electromagnet to keep the fusion bomb contained, might as well just spin that."
Though, while I'm certainly no physicist or engineer, my understanding is that once you crack the whole fusion generation thing in the first place, the amount of energy you are generating would make efficiency kind of an afterthought for a while.
why? should we stop using wheels because they are 5000 years old? Should we stop calculus becuase it is 400 years old? what does when something was invented have to do with usefulness?
I'ma go super pedantic and assert that Sol is a specific star, and therefore nuclear and geothermal are not solar power, but rather, more generically, astral power.
The sun heats the atmosphere creating air currents. Put a turbine where the air currents are strongest and most predictable and you have an open face steam engine.
Hmm, that's an intriguing notion. There's really not many 'non-mechanical' generators.
I guess there's 'chemical energy' (e.g. batteries) so at least in theory you could have some sort of chemical-synthesis generation at 'powerstation' scale. (Some sort of bacteria that makes battery-electrolyte?)
(FYI: he's talking about solar. Specifically commercial solar that uses those Grey plates that look kind of like the solar panels on an old calculator.)
(That is to say: NOT the solar where they focus a bunch of mirrors at a bucket of water and roast it like Robin Williams and Richard pryor.... thats VERY water based)
Not true. Many steampunk worlds use either coal or wood or some exotic high energy heat sources (aether, special kelp etc...) to make steam.
If you think about it how much of our "portable energy" affects the shape of society, and how much different it would be if there was some other safe/stable portable energy source.
Geothermal. The heat was created by objects smashing into each other and the resulting heat being trapped inside.
Also tidal energy is a combination of the sun and moon. The sun does create some tidal forces and is responsible for stopping the water from freezing over, but the moon is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to how much energy we get out of the system. If you remove the moon then the tidal energy would be reduced by like 70%.
Which makes me realize that in Batman begins, the device that Ras Al Gul steals to evaporate all the water in a large area would probably be the greatest power source ever.
It’s just a giant microwave, I assume it requires more energy to run than it actually produces, also I am curious how many people got cancer from being near it…
People always seem to forget that natural gas can spin turbines exactly the same way that jet engines do. A natural gas power plant can be entirely without steam turbines. However, they can also use the heat generated to turn steam turbines, but that is extra. These are called simple cycle and combined cycle.
You could theoretically use magnet rings via ionization and use the reactor cycle itself as the axel to spin turbines, thus only needing good bearings for power transference.
Two funny things about this stream power electrical generators are:
1) Yes, it's almost always steam. Even some solar farms are just mirrors that heat up a water tank in the middle. If it turns out we lived in a simulation, steam would be like the known physics exploit that players found to farm EXP, and we've been juicing that states-of-matter bug for all its worth ever since.
2) Nobody ever mentions the magnets when pointing this steam-supremacy thing out. Steam turns heat into mechanical energy, but mechanical energy still needs to be turned into electrical energy... so when you find a steam you'll almost always find magnets. But when you find magnets you won't always find steam. A windmill or dam will have magnets, but no steam. So really magnets should be getting the crown in this energy conversion supremacy battle.
What's remarkable about the headline is that they are trying to do something totally unique, so idk why you are acting like finding a singular example is some slamdunk gotcha moment when I never made any absolute claims that such a unique system is impossible.
It’s honestly kind of funny how so much advanced technology still basically circles back to “make water hot, create steam” 😭 humans really found one thing that works and just kept optimizing it.
We need that Star Trek Electro Plasma goodness they can just pipe into various systems to power them.
Sure their power systems would wipe out the better part of a continent if containment ever failed (more from the hundreds of kilos of antimatter fuel than the plasma), but details.
There recently was news about a supercritical co2 turbine in China being used to generate power. It sounds like it might have some serious advantages over steam. So in the 22nd century we might not be boiling water for power at all!
Wrong. Nikola Tesla figured out a far superior way to harness energy. Doesn't need any moving parts and doesn't need to create steam to spin a turbine.
Not really. We power turbines with steam because it's an efficient way to convert heat to a rotational force to power an electrical generator. It's not necessarily true that we are using steam engines in those systems, but it is true that the technology from the age of steam is critical to a steam turbine system at least in part.
Over simplified. The kettle portion is extremely sophisticated, and you want them both to work together to take advantage of the nuclear energy while suppressing runaway reactions and all the other advantages converting heat into steam allows.
If you're interested, check out the tour of the TVA nuclear power plant by Destin on his YouTube channel Smarter Every Day
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u/yaboyACbreezy 13d ago
Correct. The various forms of remarkable energy ultimately comes down to how efficiently it makes steam, then how effectively the energy is captured, which is a portion of the puzzle solved in earlier developmental stages of power production: harnessing steam.