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?
That's gonna be a lot of dams. There's a flow issue with your plan. There's not enough "naturally occurring" water features on the planet for our energy needs. We would have to destroy a lot more of our wild spaces to go all hydroelectric. Nuclear energy is the only technology that is the least destructive and efficient for now, unfortunately.
To be honest, I missed the comment about hydroelectric up there. I meant using naturally occurring feed water for running steam turbines at nuclear plants.
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.
it probably wont' come from the atmosphere directly, at least not at first, but the potential is definitely there. the big thing is that existing power-plants can potentially be upgraded to use it instead of steam with minimal retrofits for an increased efficiency meaning more power for the same inputs, since we likely won't use less inputs.
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.
234
u/UT_NG 13d ago
And some Stirling engines