• empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    Water and steam just too goddamn convenient. Super high latent heat so it can move a ton of energy with a quick phase change, works at reasonable pressures and temperatures, stays liquid all the time when you want it to so pumps work, and it’s so readily available as to be damn near free. Super cool!

  • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Solar photovoltaic is the only one i can think of that isn’t just a fancy way to make steam

    EDIT

    ok let’s clarify to say a method that isn’t related to movement of a fluid that spins a turbine. So not windmills (air is a fluid), not hydro, not geothermal, etc.

    • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Piezoelectricity is the only other I can really think of. But it’s not like we are out here smacking crystals with hammers to make power.

      • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        Why not, though?

        On a serious note: that’s exactly what we’re doing with lighters. At least some of them use piezo elements and not the sparkly wheel thingy to ignite the gas. And it’s real fun to zap yourself with it.

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Yeah, it was a fun journey of learning to look into it. It’s quartz btw. Very piezoelectric and extremely common.

        • wia@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          The conversion rate isn’t great.

          There were talks of using them in sidewalks, but it doesn’t really make much sense really. Piezo almost always only works as energy recovery, which isn’t nothing but you will need the infrastructure which also isn’t nothing.

      • bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 months ago

        Give buskers the acoustic guitar with a link to the grid and every time they play they’ll generate a ton of electricity (in relative terms…)

        Electro-Acoustic guitars use piezos to pick up the audio if you didn’t know

      • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Even if we used piezo, the movement of the hammer would still have to come from some power source, which would still be the same sources like moving steam, water, or wind.

          • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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            8 months ago

            piezo crystal is electric motor. you input deformation of the crystal and get potential difference on opposite sides. other way around also works

              • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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                8 months ago

                it’s a special case there, because for frequencies in question mechanical quartz resonator has much higher Q than any electrical resonator you can practically build. that is, mechanical properties of piezo crystal stabilize voltage oscillations

    • Voyajer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      All power generation is either solar or ‘make thing spin’, unless we’re including RTGs and Piezoelectrics.

    • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Hydro power uses running water not hot water.

      Squeezing can be converter to electricity with pizeo electric. Heat difference can be converted into electric directly with peltier devices. Both of these are very inefficient ways to make electricy.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      The peltier effect can be used to generate electricity from a thermal gradient. It’s not very efficient, though. There’s a reason mechanical means of electrical production predominate.

    • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      I guess aeolic energy also doesn’t use steam (unless we count the air humidity), but still involves turning a turbine.

    • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Aerokinetics/hydrokinetics as well. With steam, we’re creating the source fluid that turns the turbines to make electricity. Those source fluids can also exist as wind/tides/rivers naturally.

  • Rossphorus@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Some types of fusion can bypass steam generation and use what’s creatively called Direct Energy Conversion. If the fusion products are charged particles they can be passed through a magnetic field to separate them based on charge and collected onto plates. When you look at the electric potential between the plates you’ve effectively created a voltage, no steam necessary. It’s also theoretically possible to do the same with some types of fission products too.

    • Another Catgirl
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      8 months ago

      I thought they take advantage of the velocity of the charged ions to magnetically transfer power to electromagnetic coils around the reactor.

      • Rossphorus@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        There’s a whole bunch of mechanisms, largely depending on the fusion architecture and the atoms being fused. For tokamak reactors the circular nature lends itself well to what you describe, though usually it’s energy being imparted into the ions to keep them contained and away from the walls. In the ‘standard’ deuterium-tritium fusion model (the easiest to perform) fusion produces a helium nucleus and a neutron, where the neutron gets most of the energy. Since a neutron can’t be contained by magnets it impacts the chamber walls. This heat is wicked away by, you guessed it, cooling water which turns into steam. In order to use a direct energy conversion strategy you need a fusion reaction that produces no neutrons, but we’re not there yet.

    • TheUniverseandNetworks@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      generate electricity.

      not generate electricity.

      generate electricity the other way around.

      not generate electricity.

      generate electricity.

      not generate electricity.

      generate electricity the other way around.

      not generate electricity…

      Edit: I dumbly misread your post (energy/electricity) & thought of this, which I will leave here because it made me smile & that’s a good thing.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    /uj Steam is just an intermediary form for almost all these tho (except maybe geothermal? not sure), not the real source.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      Steam just makes sense as a fluid for heat engines, thermal power plants are mostly steam, except when gas turbines are involved, but even then there’s most of the time steam bottoming cycle. (gas turbine burns something, then exhaust is hot enough to power steam cycle) Unless thermal power plant is small, then it’s more likely to be diesel engine (up to few MW). Only when it’s photovoltaics, or hydropower, or wind farm (or tidal powerplant, or some other weird ones) there’s no place for steam to be involved (solar thermal plants sometimes use steam cycle). Geothermal powerplants use steam if source is hot enough, otherwise it’s something more volatile in organic Rankine cycle

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          8 months ago

          Then it’s just heat transfer medium for most of geothermal powerplants too, because from what i understand, most of the time condensed water is recycled (and source of energy is just “hot rocks” anyway)

          then if you look at the bigger picture, all that energy can be traced back to either sun, nuclear fission (in reactors) or nuclear decay/primordial heat (geothermal)

      • zout@fedia.io
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        8 months ago

        True, but there are also solar steam systems, using a parabolic mirror to focus the sun on a steam drum.

        • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 months ago

          Arguably these are even greener than photovoltaics, since they don’t require the same kinds of materials to make (mostly just steel) and last longer than photovoltaics are supposed to. They use a fair bit of water, but you probably aren’t building them in places where water is at a premium.

          • Strykker@programming.dev
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            8 months ago

            I mean the main steam cycle solar plants are built in dry sunny hot regions, not exactly a great source of water, but probably not completely void of it either.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    8 months ago

    I like piezoelectrics and kinetic generators. The only two methods of generating electricity I know of that don’t involve steam other than solar panels.

    At least, I think they’re different… Is a standard copper wire+magnet generator pizeoelectric? Or is it simply the operation is similar in that you generate electricity from moving things together? Like the difference between tiny little things in your shirt that generate electricity as you move around vs those flash lights you shake to charge.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      Piezoelectric effect is when you vibrate certain crystals and they give off electricity. It’s also reversible. You can feed them electricity to generate sound. The beep-boop sound from small electronic devices is usually from a piezo speaker, because they’re dirt cheap.

      You don’t get significant amounts of power out of it, though.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Yeah it’s quartz lol

        Also photovoltaic is reversible as well! Put light in get current out, put current in, get light out. But the diodes that get good light for the currents we use are shit for generating the current we like from the light we have and vice versa. Also! Most diodes are these types! That’s why we make their casing black, otherwise the light will interfere with computation!

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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        8 months ago

        Yeah. The one thing I ever saw that has me excited for a product that could exist, is that they can power a simple OLED display. And since an OLED display can be paper thin, they could put one in a t-shirt and you could have an animated design on your shirt instead of just a static picture. And that would be dope.

        Of course, you’d need more than just the display, and i don’t think the little generators that can be sewn into a shirt would be enough to power the computing device that would be necessary to drive the animation for the display.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      They’re different. The piezoelectric effect converts pressure to charge. However steam is just kinetic with an extra step

  • FreshLight@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    It always produces unbelievably great memes when another person discovers how humanity generates energy from splitting atoms. I was baffled, too.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It just makes sense. Our only way to convert electromagnetic radiation to current is photovoltaics, so solar. No way to convert alpha/beta radiation to current. So what else does fission release? Fuckload of motion. Mostly heat if it’s not as a blast, in which case it’s still mostly heat but with a pressure wave that levels cities. Heat though, heat were real good at making into electricity.