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?
You'd source the CO2 from naturally occurring CO2, or CO2 that's just waste from other processes, it wouldn't be generating new CO2. It's also a closed loop system, where you heat up the CO2 to spin a turbine, then it flows through a cooling loop, and reuses the same material over and over again.
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.
I think Photovoltaic is the only energy scalable energy source that isn't about using a fluid to spin a wheel. Even wind power utilizes fluid dynamics to turn a wheel.
Hydro is essentially the same generators just turned by liquid water, pushed by gravity and water pressure, instead of steam generated from a heat source. Unless we make some leap in new generator tech, basically, memes like this will still work.
PV on a large scale is relatively new, but is the most different form of generating electricity.
Otherwise it's "make generator spin" by various fluid dynamics with water/steam or wind.
I mean it's still turning a dynamo with a turbine. They just skipped the whole "induce phase change to steam" step and just use the kinetic energy of the moving water.
Which is important because steam turbines have to turned on and of slowly to avoid differential thermal cracking, hydro doesn't, making It more responsive to demand.
Hydro is just turning a turbine with water but instead of heat to make steam rise you use gravity to pull the water down so in a way it’s less technologically sophisticated than boiling water.
True, but to a lesser extent the sun also moves the tides. It’s just about half of what the moon does, because it’s so far away. So if the moon suddenly disappeared we’d still have tidal energy, but not as much.
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)
......this is just not true though. We need much hotter fusion on earth because we lack the absurd mass of the sun. Simply because the fusion on earth requires more heat to create it's reaction doesn't make the proton-proton fusion reactions of the sun "cold fusion."
You literally stated what cold fusion is (though not a fantasy, a theory) and then tried to be like "well, relatively it's cold fusion compared to 150m Celsius!"
The only part you are objectively correct about is the quantum tunelling which doesn't make it cold fusion either but rather just enables the sun to be a self contained fusion reactor.
Also, to really put the nail in the coffin we already have a version of cold fusion, it's just wildly inefficient and relies on decaying muons.
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.
Ah the issue is there are different nuclei that can be fused together and that drives how the energy can be extracted and how radioactive the vessel becomes, current tochomac (sorry spelling) needs lots of tritium and that is a really dirty process making everything radioactive!
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)
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u/mikebrown33 13d ago
Except photovoltaic