When the topic of renewable energy comes up I cant help but think that since anything greater in temprature than absploute zero has some level of thermal energy, why are we not able to harness it? I get the law of entropy and heat and whatnot but even if its inefficient, why can we not use heat, only heat differences, to generate electricity. I get how RTGs and nuclear power works, but those both require some kind of thing that is cool in addition to what is hot. Why not just use the energy in the heat of whatever we have? If you believe in the concept of the universe having a “heat death” then you also get that its not that one part of the universe loses it heat and one part gains it, its that every atom in the universe loses heat. If thats the case then why cant we have uniform heat loss on earth?
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Heat death is where everything reaches the same temperature, so there is no difference to exploit to get useful energy. It isn’t about things getting uniformly cooler, but everything trending towards a middle point.
This is a bit of an unsatisfactory answer but we can’t just make use of the thermal energy of an object because the laws of thermodynamics say that in order to turn heat into work you need to also move some heat from a hot to a cold place.
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