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kerrigan778@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

I actually don’t know why people get so hung up on this. When you are making energy it’s easiest to make heat, and boiling water through a turbine is a really efficient way to turn heat into motion and we’re really good at doing it and turning motion into electricity. The fact that multiple ways of making heat exist is not surprising, the fact that different methods of making heat use the same, most efficient, well understood method for turning heat into electricity is even less surprising.

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thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Because it feels archaic and inefficient, maybe?

We also have developed solar panels, wind turbines, hydro-electric dams as well as tidal/wave energy devices in the intervening years - so adding another method to boil water just feels “outdated”.

I’m not trying to cast judgement myself, just trying to explain that it feels like it’s just “vibes based”.

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- rain_enjoyer@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Take a look at a modern supercritical steam turbine, this thing can run on 600C steam. there’s nothing archaic about it (it can be more efficient as a part of combined cycle)
  
  Hydropower and windmills are older than steam
  
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- swab148@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I had an idea for a dumb Star Trek meme, based on the episode where they explain how Romulan warp drives work, but extrapolating that to “it boils water and spins a turbine”. Maybe one of the Star Trek memers can take this and run with it?
  
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  - Tiral@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    You mean black holes as a power source?
    
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    swab148@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Yeah, the black hole one. Like, they use the heat generated by the black hole to boil water, spin thingy. Super dumb, could be funny!
    
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- vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Three of your four examples are already outputting mechanical energy of motion so don’t need the intervening conversion step provided by steam.
  
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ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The problem is there’s an upper limit on how much useful energy you can extract from a heat engine.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle

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- rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  AND that can maintain absolute Zero on that cold side. Getting heat to leave into the void at those temps is a battle
  
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