It is pretty funny that as advanced as our technology gets, we’re still basically just at the higher end of the “steam engine” phase.
Turns out heat engines are like… pretty good at turning arbitrary energy sources into useful work! Who knew!
Yeah about that.
Those are termosolar powerplant, they use the sun to boil water and spin a turbine.
Its even more metal they heat salt that heats water to spin the turbine. This keeps the power generation well after sun down.
That technology is a relic of the past. Solar panels are cheap and efficient now. Just use solar panels.
And much easier to operate and troubleshoot.
Ahkshually, those tend to boil salt…which is later used to boil water.
That’s what they want you to think. I bet it also powers a secret orbital space laser. I should know, a man with a theoretical degree in physics told me.
Solar panels are all nice and stuft, but what about some boiled water?
Boil water? What am I, a chemist?
A cook?
Pasta bitches!!
china already have a supercritical carbon dioxide system integrated into a functioning powergrid and operating commercially. The system exploits an exotic phase of co2 which expands to fill a volume like gas, but moves frictionlessly through tubes as a liquid. There are concerns about lifespan because of how caustic the system is, but apparently some new materials are being trialled which negate this.
This is mainly integrated AFAIK in industrial processes with high amounts of low entropy heat available (i.e. big volumes of not-that-hot liquids), and it allows for electric production from said heat with unprecedented efficiency. Cool shit
Fun Fact: Since 2006-2007 Uruguay’s power infrastructure has mostly relied on green energy, making up over 90% of their power infrastructure, also making them fully self sustaining power wise
yeah some countries have that, like sweden and austria. the reason is because they’re very mountaineous areas, so there’s a lot of water power to harvest. in germany, which is really flat, that would have been impossible with water alone.
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fully self sustaining power wise
Damn, imagine that.
Talk about national security.
only 3.4 M people, little industry
Now we just need solar boilers.
To boil water.
turns out we sort of have that. only it does not boil water, but heats the air so liquid hydrocarbons come out of it https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/186f37f3-be00-415e-8bbb-439b66ee2b75/content
I’m pretty sure we have actual solar water heaters too tbh
All it takes is a water pipe painted black zigzagging inside a box which is black inside and has the sun facing side replaced by glass.
You can get hot water from something like that even in Winter.
you can get>200F from a passive solar air heater made of soda cans on a 30F day.
https://www.instructables.com/Aluminum-Can-Solar-Heater/
we do. they are about the size of a solar panel, look similar and are on some roofs of houses in my area. the ones i’m refering to are not for boiling water, just for preheating so need less energy when it goes back into the [ger: heizungskreislauf]. all the ones i know are older then the current PV panel boom. fun fact, there are even concepts (and implentation, but i can’t find it) for vacuum glas tubes that have a parabolic mirror around a black painted copper pipe, which should be able to generate ~400 °C “process heat”. but they are not wide spread, cause PV is so much cheaper now
ACKSHUALLY we’re going to put special solar panels inside the reactor.
And then use the solar panels to power a water boiler.
D’oh!!!
Yeah, I want a pot of tea
Harness the power of the sun, but indoors!
It is artificial sun basically, so…
I think thats the plan right? Steam turbines i mean…
Yes, because electricity is just things spinning, and steam is the easiest way to make things spin.
People are essentially internal combustion engines that burn food. Trying to capture that energy in ways that increases the load on us just causes us to need more calories. That’s counter productive as you could just burn said food itself to get energy, and agriculture is an energy and environmentally intensive industry to begin with.
check out helion. they are trying to make small, modular reactors that are cheaper to build and maintain, so they can be deployed easier than fission reactors and the couple of fusion designs that already exist. iirc they have the actual fusion part working and are now working on actually getting the energy out of it. real engineering has some good videos about them on nebula and YouTube.
Super cool, thanks for the share. It will be interesting to see what sort of efficiency they get from the inductive energy transfer.
Hopefully they’re not just another Theranos.
Helion has had “a working power-producing system in five years!” since 2017.
sigh
Fusion reactors might be more resource efficient
I had to laugh at this one lol
Yes, Jimmy; you are.
