Why do human electricity generation so focused on efficently boiling water and turning a turbine with it. do we have other ways of generating electricity every power plant i know (coal gas nuclear) does the turbine method ? And why is boiling water and turning a turbine with it so great ?
In: Physics
Most electricity we use comes from machines physically pushing electrons through wires kind of like water going through in a pipe. Magnets push electrons through the wires. It works well by rotating the magnet really fast with coiled wires wrapped around it as the electrons go round and round through the windings until they zoom down the wires at the end. This rotating magnets and coiled wires is pretty simple as far as machines go and quite efficient! Now you just need a motor to turn the magnet!
Boiling water makes steam and making it go through a steam turbine is really pretty efficient and clean and repeatable. All you need is a heat source to superheat the steam and boom you’re off to making tons of electricity to send around the city.
Typically we’ve burned coal, oil, natural gas to heat the steam but nuclear derived heat and other sources work well. Most of the pollution from electricity comes from burning the fuel. The rest is simple and mostly just water in pipes.
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