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
It hits a very fine line of ease of use and efficiency. After you get the steam it’s all fairly standard how you move that around to spin the turbine. Water is abundant and after it’s used for steam it winds up coming back down as rain.
We do have other ways of generating electricity, such as hydroelectric, which uses the natural movement of water to spin a wheel. Or using the steam through a piston to generate that rotation as well. Then you have wind turbines and solar which don’t use water or steam at all.
Not all forms of electricity generation use this method, solar panels generate electricity directly, they don’t pass through the boiling water step.
Hydro power also doesn’t boil the water, it just uses turbines spun by water that has pressure behind it because of gravity.
Otherwise though, the most common form of energy, and the easiest to get, is heat. You burn something and you get heat. The most efficient way we know of to get electricity from heat, is indeed to use that heat energy to boil water and turn it into steam, use that steam tu turn a turbine which acts as an electrical generator because of moving magnets causing electricity.
There is source of electricity that does not rely on spinning a turbine: Photovoltaics, aka solar panels.
Solar, hydro dams, fuel cells, wind power, tidal generation, internal combustion generators…
The ones that use steam and turbines are systems that are converting heat. And it uses that solution because it’s very effective.
Wind, hydro, solar panels and geothermal do not rely on boiling water at all. Fossil fuels (which are burned) and nuclear (which produces heat through nuclear reactions) do heat water (generally) to produce steam to spin turbines. Since they produce heat, naturally we want to put that heat to productive use. What else could we do with those fuel sources to produce energy we can use?
boiling water is like the OG way to make electricity right. it’s reliable and simple. turbines are just super efficient at turning steam into power. other methods exist like solar or wind but they just don’t make as much power consistently. so sticking to what works is kinda a no brainer you know. it’s like sticking to pizza when there’s a buffet but pizza is just that good
It is the same reason why we stick to round shaped wheels rather than lets say square or triangle shaped wheel. Sometimes theres that one best solution to a given problem. In this case, while there are many ways to generate electricity, the best way is by spinning a generator really fast.
We want power for a long time, that means something going round and round and round. That leads to spinning magnets inside coiled wires.
An easy way to get energy out of wood and coal and gas is to burn them, the energy comes out as heat so there needs to be some way to go heat -> spinning.
Water is easily available, cheap, safe at room temperature and when it boils into steam it expands 1000x making a very strong pushing force. Other options are available, any [heat engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_engine) such as a [Mercury vapour turbine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine) could work, but Mercury isn’t as cheap, as easily available, or as safe to work with.
Water -> steam -> spinning is a great blend of useful, useable, affordable, and good enough.
> do we have other ways of generating electricity
Tons of them; Pumped storage hydroelectric uses water rushing downhill to spin turbines. Wind turbines use wind blowing on blades. Solar panels use sunlight energy hitting semiconductors. Wave and tidal generators use ocean movement. At smaller sizes, gas and diesel cars drive alternators to charge their batteries, Sterling engines work on any heat source, Peltier effect devices use warmth on semiconductors, people pedaling on bicycles with dynamo lights, electric cars do regenerative braking to turn wheel rotation into electricity.
Mechanical generation isn’t really about boiling water, it’s about getting something to spin, water and steam are an easy option.
So everything from coal, to nuclear end up being heat water up, steam makes a thing spin, electricity.
You could do this with a variety of things, refrigerants… Even propane or ethanol, but why bother when water is plentiful, cheap, non toxic and easy to obtain and store.
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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