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 gas plants are like jet engines and spin the turbine directly without going through steam. There’s often a secondary stage that uses the waste heat from that to make steam and drive another turbine.
But still, yes, spinning wires in an electric field is the best way we’ve come up for turning most forms of energy into electricity.
Generators themselves [are extraordinary efficient](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/generator-efficiency), like 95%+.
Early industrial civilization found itself in a world with lots of easily available chemical energy, so they adopted to that, and heat engines (steam engines and later gas turbines) were how the technology of the day could use those. At this point we’ve been perfecting heat engines for centuries, and they’re pretty closer to theoretical limits.
There are alternate ways of turning chemical energy into electricity like fuel cells, but they have never gotten to the point where they work well enough to compete generally with heat engine generators.
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