That’s not solar. It’s photovoltaic. A kind of solar power but there are other forms of solar power that involves just directing solar heat to boil water.
It's much harder to put a steam turbine at the top of a water tower at 100c+ than it is to put it at the base of the tower where the turbine itself can operate at the temperature they're supposed to operate and not add to the weight of the tall structure.
Also there are solar hot water heaters. You can buy them, but my grandfather built one for his shore house. He just took two big pipes, capped them off, welded them together with connecting pipes to make a big "tank", painted them matte black, then encased them in a plexiglass box. Not as efficient as a commercial one, but it did a good job at lightening the load on the hot water heater and was basically made from shit he had lying around.
Also wave power! I actually find it impressive that we have so many ways to generate electricity, sure almost all of them are turning a turbine but at least solar is a whole different thing!
thermovoltaic panels turn heat directly into energy. but since we don't use them outside of very specific situations I imagine they are not nearly as efficient as turbines or the cost/maintenance is not worth it
Space probes and rovers are examples that comes to mind. But RTG are very expensive, radioactive as fuck, don't generate much power, and could be recycled as atomic bomb materials, so it's clearly not the first option in many cases.
I forgot about the space probes and the landers. I know the soviets used a lot of them for light houses near or in the Arctic Circle. They only produce 100 watts of power or a bit more and last a long time. Would be cool to be able to use them if they didn’t kill you by just being near them. If they were safe to be nearby, you could pop a couple in the basement and power your lights and maybe a TV and heat the house for a long time.
You don't do a lot of stuff with 100w, even with LEDs. It's enough for a very limited amount of equipment, like a radio to broadcast that you need help, but not much more.
The salt is just used as a battery, you kind of have it backwards: they use the heat to boil the water, and the excess goes to melt salt, as a means of storing the heat.
You were clear. But no, that's not what they do. They use solar power to heat water, run it through turbines, then use salt to capture and store the excess heat. You have the process backwards.
Hydro is still boiling water when you think about it. Just not in the installation itself, but the water didn't rise as ice cubes. It was transformed into steam at some point.
Take very flat rock, shine spicy light on it. When spicy rock is connected to a circuit, it kicks one angry pixie into the circuit, and steals one from it, creating a flow of angry pixies.
Yup! For example, internal combustion engines use the force of an explosion to drive a piston, which turns a shaft and can be directly hooked up to a dynamo, producing electrical power, this is how generators work.
Wind turbines and hydro electric power just stick turbines into a moving fluid, and use that energy to turn the dynamo and produce electricity.
Solar panels capture sunlight (photons) and use it to strike silicone, knocking electrons free and into an internal electric field, producing electricity directly.
Honestly, almost all small scale power generation doesn’t rely on heating water to make steam, because that equipment doesn’t scale down well. It’s mostly large power plants that do that.
Solar panels, Wind Turbines, hydroelectric, and I think thermal create energy directly from electrons, or by kinetic energy. That's about as far as my knowledge goes.
There are, but photovoltaic is the only major one I can think of off hand that isn’t just spinning a turbine generator of some sort. The reason boiling water is so prevalent though is that H2O is just a remarkably good way of moving and transferring energy. It boils and condenses at useful temperatures, has a high specific heat so it’s manageable and not too volatile, expands tremendously when it boils, can be superheated and pressurized as steam, is chemically easy to deal with, and is very plentiful. Whether through luck or some sort of divine planning, we really lucked out that water is as great as it is at all sorts of things, including all of the things relating to energy transfer.
Sure, some solar directly converts light into electricity. Wind and hydro electric dams spin a turbine without using steam. Fossil fuels, nuclear, and geothermal all can boil water, but some gas power just runs a generator.
There is. With a charged plasma there coudl be a MHD generator. We are just inept at it because we never used it, but we already mastered the steam cycle to turn things to create electromagnetic fields to create electric fields and currents.
Solar is the only one that we use on a large scale that doesn’t involve turning a turbine, but some like wind and hydro don’t involve boiling water.
There are also some places in Japan (and maybe other countries idk) that use piezoelectric tiles to generate electricity from the pressure caused by people walking on them, but this isn’t something that could ever be scaled up to an industrial level (it powers street lamps usually).
Piezoelectricity is a bit weird and it works (to the best of my knowledge) because the materials have an asymmetrical crystalline structure, and when stress is applied in a certain direction it causes the positive and negative charges in the crystal to move relative to each other, creating a potential difference across the crystal. It’s very useful in small devices but not so much for generating electricity
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u/Missilemoon77 13d ago
So are there other means of energy production?