The Vapour Compression Cycle is rather effecient, over 300% in some cases. Why couldn’t we use that to create a near limitless amount of energy by drawing heat from the atmosphere and using it to boil water to power a turbine?
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In: Engineering
The second law of thermodynamics forbids doing this kind of thing.
There’s a few equivalent ways of stating the second law. One is that “entropy always increases”. Another is known as the “Clausius statement”, which says:
>”It is impossible to construct a device which operates on a cycle and whose sole effect is the transfer of heat from a cooler body to a hotter body”
You can use a device to transfer heat from a cooler body to a hotter body, but you have to put in additional energy to do so, you can’t get it for free. The amount you’d have to put in would, in the best case, totally cancel out the amount you’d get out from the turbine.
Basically, there’s two ways that thermodynamics gets you. The first is that you can’t create energy out of nothing, and the second is that energy always gets converted into useless unrecoverable waste heat.
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