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
For the longest time the only real way we knew to create electricity is… motion. Spin a thing with friction fast enough. Think like the bycicles or big hamster wheels that can generate electricity for its most basic form. And spinning a giant round thing through heat or water or wind running by over it is just the most scalable and efficient way we know to do that in mass.
In the last 20-30 years we started to find other ways. Both to use other motion (ie spinning magnets) as well as direct ways like modern solar panels.
But having a technology that works, and having a a technology be reliable, cheap and mass producible are two different things. A 100 years roughly passed between us inventing the combustion engine and cars starting to take over normal life. You can see the same starting to happen with renewable energy generation in the last few years. I remember around the early 2000s when everybody laughed at the idea of silly renewable green fancy ideas ever being relevant. Today it’s a massive portion of energy production in most developed countries going up. But these things take time.
The three biggest factors are (roughly):
1) technological readiness – cold fusion is already possible but right now running it costs more than the amount of power it creates is worth and its not yet mass producible. The tech simply isn’t there YET!
2) Public acceptance – transferring from one energy source to another will always be expensive to set up, initially expensive till we can get to a scale where factories compete to mass produce the parts cheaper, and will need people to make change behaviors. To get over this hill you need massive investments and those only happen if people really want a thing
3) Infrastructure – let’s take solar. Essentially 1) & 2) are ready. Solar panels these days are cheap, can almost endlessly be produced (as long as we don’t run out of resources) and people love it. So why don’t we slap solar panels on every roof in any nation with halfway decent sunlight and take all those turbine plants offline? Mostly because our entire power infrastructure (how the right amount power gets from the producer to the people) is built around generating massive amounts of power in one place, and then distributing it.
If we suddenly have hundreds of thousands of mini power producers in all these houses with solar panels, we have not built the cables and power nodes etc to feed that back into a system. We have no practical way to collect and distribute it.
We have all the technologies we need to theoretically do that… but overhauling the cables and power stations and software and ways of planning for charging demand (when people get home in the BBC evening they need more power than at night or midday)… that’s a MASSIVE undertaking that well cost billions, be a lot of work and take a long time.
And since the old system still works people do not yet want solar power bad enough to invest that amount of money and time.
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In reality there are even more factors in psychology, planning and how we build civilizations but this gives you a rough idea. Hope that helped 🤗
So TLDR: We DO have other ways to create power that are actually more efficient/cleaner but taking technology concepts to mass society standards takes a long time and tons of will/investment.
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