Ugga is confused. Ugga needs help. Why basically only turbines?
* Nuclear power. Turbines.
* Water power (waterfall, dams and so on). Turbines.
* Wind power. Turbine (This one i accept).
* Wave power. Turbines.
* Coal power. Turbines.
The only one i can think of that doesnt use turbines is solar power. Have we not in our 250+ years of harnessing energy come up with a way of getting said power without using turbines except for solar power? Or is it just that, its our most effective way?
How do we extract energy from our fusion trial chambers? Is it just the heat being funneled to a watertank with a turbine?
RTGs in satellites uses thermocouple. Im guessing solar works in a similar way?
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You are not wrong. Thermocouples, solar, chemicals (batteries) and moving a magnet next to wires are the main ways of producing power. Of these, a turbine is pretty easy to build and run. If you can make heat then you can make steam which means you can run a turbine which means you get electricity.
Fusion may open up news ways to push electrons, but at first it will still be turning a turbine.
Using motion of moving things to spin a turbine is very effective way of generating power, and very convenient too. Turbine doesn’t occupy too much space and doesn’t need to move anywhere. And in our 250+ years of harnessing energy we have really perfected this way, starting with wind and water mills. And, building a bigger turbine is not a big deal.
There are alternatives though. For solar energy we learned to generate energy directly from photons hitting the solar panel, which is cool. For thermal energy we learned to generate energy from temperature difference (if we have 2 surfaces of different temperature close together). For nuclear energy we have learned to build batteries out of radioactive material.
However we only had a few decades to improve those technologies. They are costly and ineffective. We cannot scale them up as good as turbines. But hey, give it another 200 years and maybe we will.
Efficiency. Currently, spinning turbines which turn a coil of wire within a permanent magnet is the most efficient power generation method for mass scale we have.
When we figure out a better and more efficient method, that will be the new process.
Can someone explain why a GOOD Stirling engine can’t beat a turbine? Are turbines always better still?
>Why is every power generation basically just turbines?
We are transitioning from our first method of power generation to our next one.
>The only one i can think of that doesnt use turbines is solar power.
There are a limited number of answers. The most likely answer is
turbines are the best method we have found to convert movement to electricity. If superior non-turbines methods existed they would be used in new power plants. If corruption held the non-turbine plan from being used, that corruption would have to be world wide making it extremely unlikely.
>Have we not in our 250+ years of harnessing energy come up with a way of getting said power without using turbines except for solar power?
Yes, but electricity is still a very new technology for humanity.
There is [a cable that generates electricity when stretched.](https://www.machinedesign.com/motors-drives/article/21826787/stretching-wire-generates-current) There is [a material that generates electricity when you walk on it.](https://futurism.com/new-flooring-tech-generates-electricity-through-your-footsteps) I haven’t looked into the issues with those types of technology, but if they were superior and cost effective, they would be used.
>How do we extract energy from our fusion trial chambers? Is it just the heat being funneled to a watertank with a turbine?
We mostly burn stuff… Heat causes water to change form a liquid to a gas, which increases the space the water vapor takes. That water vapor gas pushes on everything around it. That pushing gas leaves by the point of least resistance. That point of least resistance is built to change the push of expanding gasses into spinning (turbine). That spins magnets. The magnetic fields of the magnets pass through nearby wire. That magnetic field causes the electrons to move in the wire (induction). Electricity has been made.
Because curretnly we can’t generate electorns efficiently out of other forms of energy efficiently.
There are some metallurgy magic, that some metals create current due to heating.
But currently the most efficient way to create current is to make electrons move that are already there. That can be done with moving magnets. The best way of movement that is repetitive and can go forever is rotation. Hence Turbines.
So yes, ever since the invention of the steam engine and electric generators. most mayor advancement if energy production is built around that. We heat water to produce steam and turn a generator.
Even the next step, fusion reactors are just a new fancy way of creating heat.
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Creating electrons introduces a whole lot of problems, because with an electric circuits, electrons are not consumed, they are the little workers who do the work, but they still there.
With DC power electrons just run around in a circle pushed forward by generators and pushed back by things that use power. They are not created or destroyed
Mostly because we use an electricity-based power system, and turbines are the main way of converting mechanical energy into electricity.
Electricity is super-useful because we know how to convert rotation into electricity and electricity into rotation, and we can send it long distances by wire. That makes it extremely versatile if you want to generate power in one place and use it in another. There are very few other energy sources that offer the same convenience.
If you’re using the power source to do the work directly, you don’t need a turbine, and it is in fact a lot more efficient to do it this way. There are wind and water mills, for example, and vehicle engines that run on gas, coal, or nuclear power which they carry around with them get a lot more power for their fuel consumption than they would converting it into electricity and using that for power. The advantage of electric vehicles is not raw efficiency, but the fact that power plants can have pollutant scrubbers that wouldn’t fit in a car, and could in theory run off of green sources like wind, water, solar or geothermal energy that would be pretty tricky to fit in a vehicle.
Most of the thermal (coal and nuclear) and physical (water and wind) generation is in a form of energy that doesn’t translate very well to electricity.
Thankfully we figured out that spinning a magnet really fast (turbines!) is a great way to translate kinetic energy to electricity. So rather than try and figure out a new way to generate electricity, we just adapted one that works well enough.
Solar power is really the only form of power generation we have developed that translates one type of energy neatly into electricity.
As for the fusion reactor experiments, those are not yet at the power generation stage yet. We are only in the infancy of getting them to work by 1) getting it to last more than a tiny fraction of a second and 2) getting it to generate more energy than it takes to get the reaction going. Once we get it stable and affordable then we’ll deal with how to translate it into electricity.
A spinning magnet is one of the few ways to efficiently generate AC electricity, which is what the grid used to deliver electricity to your house.
Other types of generators that you mentioned generate DC electricity which needed to be transformed to AC first before being sent to the grid but this is not free of cost, there is some energy loss during the conversion.
To put it another way, we cannot directly use the energy we generated. Most generators generate “heat energy” but our appliances take “electrical energy”, to convert heat to electrical we heat water into steam to turn a turbine to generate AC that is then “pumped” into the grid.
Sorry but our knowledge ends about spinning magnets into coils. That is about 90 something % efficiency transforming mechanical power to electrical power.
If something better than spinning magnets and metals comes up , we are stuck up with this method.
For example, in nuclear plants, if you can find a way to transform gamma radiation directly to electricity in a verry efficient way, we will stop using steam turbines.
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