ELI5• Why you cannot use methanol or even ammonia inbpower plants instead of water. water takes more energy to boil and thus requires more coal burnt. You can condense the methanol by passing it through a waterbody of some sort so it doesn’t get lost in the atmosphere like steam does?

Question

ELI5• Why you cannot use methanol or even ammonia inbpower plants instead of water. water takes more energy to boil and thus requires more coal burnt. You can condense the methanol by passing it through a waterbody of some sort so it doesn’t get lost in the atmosphere like steam does?

In: 3

Answer 1

you are aware that the “lost” steam is the exhaust of the last cooling loop which *is* just done by using a river in a bunch of power plants.
the working steam isnt just vented.

and the water isnt heated from 0, but goes through the water-steam phase change and not much temp variation outside of that to use the steam expansion.

its also not as questionable as using a burnable solvent as a high temperature working fluid….