Eli5: If we had steam powered trains back in the day, why didn’t steam become a common “clean” energy source? Why did it die out?
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You get steam by boiling water. How do you boil the water? *That’s* the power source, not the steam.
The typical answer has been “burn *coal* to boil the water”.
Old steam engines were powered by burning wood or coal to make the steam. Not a clean energy source at the time.
Steam has to be made.
When talking about fuels or propulsion, we use words like efficiency. This basically means: how much energy (for example heat or moving distance) can I get out of a fixed amount of a certain power source.
And steam is very inefficient. It takes a lot of energy (coal fire for example) to get the water boiling.
For the same amount of money you pay for the coal, you could buy 4 times the amount of diesel fuel for a train (random numbers for clarification).
Edit: in modern days, steam engines kind of still exist. Nuclear and coal power plants are just another way of producing steam to turn generators to produce electricity.
But making the steam requires a lot of non green fuel. And it’s only capable of being used in huge power plants. Powering a car with steam would be a financial doomsday
It didnt dieand it did become common. We are still using steam power. Nuclear power heats the water that turns into steam to spin a turbine under pressure. Coal /fossil fuel /natural gas same process to boil water into steam for a turbine. Steam is inefficient and dangerous due to the excess energy needed to keep it’s temp.
We just realized there was a easier way to use steam in the form of electricity eventually. We still haven’t really figured out how to turn one source of energy into one that our energy grid supports except in hydro, wind and solar without steam.
Like others have said, steam for power generation is very much alive (and will continue to be so).
Besides not being “clean”, it’s cumbersome to generate steam power for use in many situations, especially in comparison with combustion engines, electricity delivery or storage, and other ways of producing energy.
Old steam engines were powered by burning wood or coal to make the steam. Not a clean energy source at the time.
It didnt dieand it did become common. We are still using steam power. Nuclear power heats the water that turns into steam to spin a turbine under pressure. Coal /fossil fuel /natural gas same process to boil water into steam for a turbine. Steam is inefficient and dangerous due to the excess energy needed to keep it’s temp.
We just realized there was a easier way to use steam in the form of electricity eventually. We still haven’t really figured out how to turn one source of energy into one that our energy grid supports except in hydro, wind and solar without steam.
You get steam by boiling water. How do you boil the water? *That’s* the power source, not the steam.
The typical answer has been “burn *coal* to boil the water”.
Old fashioned reciprocating steam engines died out because they’re very inefficient, heavy, and they burned coal so not at all clean either.
But we still use steam power. It’s just that these days, we use steam turbines, which are much more efficient at extracting energy from fuel. It’s still not clean energy unless the heat source is nuclear (or sometimes solar), but modern power plants burn a lot less fuel to produce a given amount of power than the old steam engines did.
Steam isn’t a clean power in trains it uses coal and the coal smoke created was a major issue from the first day it was used and steadily became a bigger and bigger issue.
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