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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Steam turbines have the highest conversion efficiency so far, and producing steam at high temperature is fairly easy and adaptable to most energy sources (you need a cold sink as well though).
The turbine is a glorified windmill.
If you have a source of energy that can make heat, you can boil water and spin the glorified windmill with steam.
The alternative is a reciprocating engine, a steam engine, which is bigger for a given power, needs more maintenance, and has the tendency to shake itself apart with vibrations.
On the efficiency, a glorified windmill can extract (by memory) 97% of energy from the steam. It’s glorified for a reason.
Solar panels and thermocouples are other means of making electricity from light and heat respectively. The advantage is that having no moving parts, they are basically maintenance free. Another advantage is that they work well at any scale. On the efficiency, they suck compared to glorified windmills.
There are solar plants that use thousands of mirrors to heat a water container on a tower, and the steam goes to a glorified windmill again, and that’s efficient. It’s just more complex and must be made at a big scale, very big as a plant.
I’m going to do you one further: you run on turbines. Proton turbines in the mitochondria create your energy reserve molecules when a proton passes through and the turbine rotates. It’s turbines all the way down.
Because spinning a giant coil of copper wire inside a huge magnet is one of the easiest ways to generate electricity.
It’s the same principle that makes electric motors work. In fact, functionally they are the same thing. Manually spin an electric motor and you’ll produce electricity. Push a lot of electricity through the wires in a turbine, and the turbine will spin.
Why magnets and wire interact like that is much more complicated.
Really want to blow your mind? Some solar power plants generate power via a turbine. They focus the sun on a specific point to heat up a working fluid, then extract that heat energy via steam & a turbine.
The reason for turbines is they are mechanically simple, require minimal maintenance and have very few moving parts. They are also very power dense and output their power on a rotating shaft, which is very easy to convert to electrical power.
One reason is we got really good at building big, efficient turbines. So, when a new power generation source comes along, ie nuclear fission, rather than design the whole thing from scratch, you just make it boil water – which is a pretty easy thing to do with a heat source – and thus use existing turbine knowledge from then on.
The “how do we get energy out” of fusion reactors hasn’t really progressed beyond “we could maybe do this”, nobody has built one yet. One idea is to surround the reactor vessel with molten salt, since it’s good at absorbing the neutrons that come out carrying most of the energy, and then having a salt – water heat exchanger to make hot water / steam which you plug into existing steam turbine technology.
The easiest form of electricity to create is alternating current. The easiest way to create that is to spin a magnet through another magnets electrical field. The easiest way to do that is with a big fan. Steam moves fans nicely, water transfers heat quite nicely and as a species, we’re realllly good at burning things to heat said water.
Isn’t it fair to say that rotational energy generation allows for a near-infinite amount of distance traveled by the generating mechanics within a system with limited space? A tire can travel along a road for miles and miles, while never leaving the axle it’s rotating around.
Think about pistons versus turbines – pistons may only have a few inches of travel between compression and expansion of the gas inside the chamber, but chaining several together via cams in a rotational system allows for the expansion in one chamber to cause the compression in another. As the pistons go up and down in a linear fashion over a limited amount of actual distance, the cams can rotate an unlimited number of times within the same system (in an ideal, friction-less scenario).
Linear generators exist, and they are not turbines. At the scale required for distributed power grids, they are competitively efficient at converting fuels to electricity.
A magnet moving through/near a coil of wire makes the electrons in the wire move or jiggle back and forth. Moving electrons is what electricity is. Turns out a spinning electric generator is a pretty good way to make lots of electrons jiggle. Electric generators are basically coils of wire and magnets.
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