Are there other methods(Not solar panels) to do it that doesn’t need a spinning turbine at all?
In: Technology
The 5 year old explanation is that spinning a copper wire around a magnet, or spinning the magnet (doesn’t matter which way it goes) creates electricity. Spinning a turbine with steam, water, or wind, is a reliable way to generate a continuous stream of electricity.
Other methods work in certain situations, but are limited when it comes to creating a full scale grid.
the laws of electromagnetism describes the magnetism and electricity as two faces of the same coin. the relation is governed by one motion of one versus the other. that is, a moving electron becomes a magnet and a moving magnet makes electrons move (electricity). therefore you can move wires in the vicinity of a magnet and make electricity inside said wire (generation), or you can move the magnet around the wire (magnetic braking, basically the same thing), or you can alternate current in one wire and make electricity in another nearby wire (wireless charging). Richard Feynman said it so cleanly in an old video that to make some wires move here you have to move some wires over there, where there could be miles away.
here’s the answer to the question. you want to make a very powerful and expensive object to move but you also don’t want it to run away.
This is all classical physics.There is another way to generate electricity that does not require motion and that is via quantum mechanics and the photoelectric effect–solar panels. those don’t need physical motion. but again if you want to move the energy somewhere else, you need huge AC voltages and in order to make that you need…..powerful rotating and expensive objects that don’t run away.
can you do all this without wheels, yes. you can collect heat at one end of a cylinder to expand the contained gas and use that motion to do the work you need. but then you need the piston to come back for which you need a ……..crankshaft oops that’s a just a wheel with wedges wrapped around it. you don’t need rotation to work with energy transfer, but you need it if you want to do it again…and again…and again.
tldr electric generation requires motion and motion moves your generator machine away. to get it back you need rotational motion. the obvious solution is a wheel that doesn’t roll on the ground. this means turbines, rotors, propellers, shafts etc.
The simple answer is that it’s cheap, easy, and efficient. We know how to do it and have been doing it for a long time.
There are several other methods but they’re more expensive and more complicated. Unless the specific task doesn’t have room for a turbine it’s generally just much easier to simply go with ol’ reliable.
In the case of steam turbines, it’s a method of converting heat energy to electricity, which so happens to be quite efficient with modern turbines. And since there are many ways of generating heat, a turbine makes it easy to make a power plant out of it.
As far as hydroelectric power is concerned, I’m not really aware of any other way to do it. It’s converting straight mechanical energy into electricity, which is pretty much exactly what a turbine is built to do.
Pure sine wave.
Heat power plants also use engines too, which also spin.
It needed newer technology for solar PV to be able to make sine wave AC electricty from DC electricity generated by the panel.
Because the 3 phase AC network used all over the world was designed around the sine wave from a spinning magnet in 3 coils 120 degrees apart from each other, so to get power like that the way to do it is with the magnet and the coils unless you want complex electronics that have not scaled well till very recently.
It is very efficient to do so, and most energy will be in mechanical form which connects to a spinning magnet very well. Sure, you can use the seebeck effect like some stovetop fans do for power, but its efficiency is terrible.
You could split out hydrogen and use that in a fuel cell, but again, terrible efficiency which is why its no good for cars despite some people thinking it will be great.
This reminds me of that “what have the Romans ever done for us?” sketch from Life of Brian.
A couple of ways to generate electricity without moving parts (other than solar panels, piezoelectric and thermoelectric generations mentioned in other comments)
There’re MHD generators, where plasma (i.e. hot ionized gas) as a conductor moves through magnetic field instead of copper coil. These generators work without moving parts (plazma is not considered as a part of generator). They’re usually added as additional cycle of generation to extract more energy from the steam that rotates turbines, but MHD can be used on their own.
There’re fuel cells which are somewhat similar to batteries, with two electrodes and catalyst that helps to split fuel to ions. Catalyst in hydrogen fuel cells splits an electron from hydrogen atom. Remaining positively charged ion of hydrogen joins oxygen and produces water, while eletron produces eletrical current.
We generate most electricity by having wires in a rotating magnetic field.
Turbines capture the energy of fluids (waters or gasses) and turns it into rotation. They can spin magnets, creating the rotating magnetic field that we use to make power.
So basically: One of the best ways we’ve found to make lots of electricity is spinning things, and turbines turn other energy (heat, gravity, wind) into spinning.
So, you know how a motor works? You apply electricity and acquire a spinning force. Well it turns out that it works in reverse as well. Applying a spinning force to something similar to a motor produces electricity (generally there are differences between a motor and generator to maximize efficiency for each of their task). And it turns out that this force -> electricity conversion is very efficient. So that’s how a lot of power generation works.
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