Are there other methods(Not solar panels) to do it that doesn’t need a spinning turbine at all?
In: Technology
You answered your own question.
Most electricity is generated by burning a fuel and generating heat. That heat is used to produce steam where the kinetic energy turns a turbine. That’s how you generate electricity from fuel. You can, technically, convert heat to electricity directly but the efficiency of that is so far beyond horrendous (it’s very hard to convert heat to anything really) that you’re wasting your time trying to do it on an industrial scale.
Other ways of generating power that don’t use fuels don’t use turbines, like solar. There are also Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs), which generate electricity from the heat from radioactive decay, but they’re very specialized and mainly used for space missions because they have no moving parts but very low output.
We don’t know of any way to generate electricity directly from a fuel otherwise, because the energy released from burning that fuel isn’t electricity.
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