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
Well I haven’t poked through every single comment here but after looking at a few one thing hadn’t come up yet — why we’re insistent on turning turbines.
That comes down to the way our power grid is set up, and the method we use to generate electricity. Let’s start with the generation first, a common and long-understood method is to have a moving magnetic field next to a conductor. The moving magnetic field produces power in the conductor. For this, it’s much more sensible to make it a rotating assembly rather than some infinitely long linear assembly.
The second is our power grid. Power is distributed as 3-phase, with each phase 120 degrees out of phase with each other. This further invites the idea of a rotating generator, where the generating coils can be placed 120 degrees apart from each other to accomplish that.
Then comes how to rotate this assembly, since it’s pretty clear that having a generator where something spins is the way to go. If we’re burning coal, how would we turn that heat into rotating motion? The same with nuclear power, it creates massive amounts of heat, how best to turn air or water that’s not really hot into rotating motion? In comes the steam turbine. In the case of a nuclear plant, it handily produces power while at the same time keeping the reactor cool enough to not melt itself apart as well.
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.
I had a massive Disappointment when I found out that all Electricity is literally made by Spinning something. I thought for a long time growing up that we had “Fuel Cells” that had “power” you know from video games and such. Nope its all Spinning Something. Not everything is boiling water though.
Power plant (Coal, Nuclear) etc is boiling water to make steam to make a turbine to spin. Nuclear lasts much longer and burns hotter than mountains of coal.
Wind Turbines have spinning blades. Water falling (Dam) on spinning blades. Water mill (Spinning wheel in water).
Probably Solar is the only non spinning something that can create electricity.
Solar can be done in two ways, Heat water to boil to spin something…
OR Solar panels to make electrons jump in a specific material and we harness the potential jump between two atoms. (If i remember correctly)
Boiling water is great because it just turns into water vapour which condenses back and we can do it again. Especially if its a Green Energy source (Wind, Water, Solar) or Something that we can “burn” but doesn’t make as much waste and lasts a long time (Nuclear) compared to (Coal, wood, Oil) etc stuff we cant make more of and burns really fast.
Additionally Water is easy to get, from a lake, from the sky, from your sink etc etc. whereas Wind, you have to be a specific place at a specific time. Similarly solar has to be the same, are there clouds, is the sun high? is the sun low.
The easiest form of energy to get is heat. Any inefficiency in any other form of energy conversion breaks down to heat anyway so by using heat we are accessing the most efficient form of energy available to us. And by far the easiest and most efficient way to convert heat to electricity is by boiling water to make steam and using that steam to turn turbines.
We do have other methods of electricity available to us, such as solar panels, but none are as easy or efficient as simply turning a turbine with steam.
All of the power plants you mention (Coal, Gas and Nuclear) are based on generating heat and then turning that heat into electricity. Using the heat to boil water and then having the boiled steam turn a turbine is a simple, efficient way to turn heat into electricity.
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