ELI5- why do we need to find different ways to generate electricity if the main thing is turning the turbine? Can’t people turn it manually?
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Sure can. In fact you can buy emergency lights and radios with a hand crank on them. And in some parts of the developing world there are generators powered by peddling a bicycle. As long as the generator spins, you get power, it doesn’t really matter how you get it to spin.
The reason you can’t head down to your local power plant and offer to replace their need for fuel is because the amount of power you get out of a generator depends on its size and the bigger it is the harder it is to turn. Also the more power it generates the harder it is to turn. A human, and even a whole bunch of humans, simply can’t turn a big enough generator fast enough to generate the amount of power needed.
Also, even if a person could, you are just trading off the power source. People still need fuel, it is just in the form of food. It is massively less efficient to grow food, feed it to a person, to create the energy needed, to turn a generator, to create electricity. It is much more efficient to burn various kinds of fuel to generate heat to create steam to turn a generator. Less energy goes in for the amount that comes back out.
Instead we search for the most efficient, and these days least polluting, way of spinning the turbine to turn the generator. Some forms are very efficient for the power that goes in, such as hydro or wind. We harvest power that was there naturally to do the work (the water was going to flow and the wind blow regardless if we stuck anything in its path to let it turn). Alas both of them have limits in where you can put them and how much power you can get back out. So we continue to use other options like coal, natural gas, and nuclear. All of which create various levels of undesirable pollution.
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