Can't improve on perfection.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Burgeoning supercritical CO2 turbine technology would like a word.
Boiling water is the only reasonable way to turn heat into electricity.
how is solar water based?
Photovoltaic panels don't turn heat into electricity. It turns light into electricity.
Not meaning to be the achkshually guy, but, heat is a kind of "light" (EM radiation) within the Infrared range of the spectrum. We can't see it, but snakes can.
If I may achkshually your achkshually, I believe that heat is the energy in the collective motion of particles of matter, and infrared photons are one way that energy can be radiated away from one body and absorbed by another.
I will uno reverse umm achkshually you. Heat is not synonymous with infrared light. Objects with heat will emit energy into their environment as EM radiation. That heat can also be conducted away through contact with another object.
All objects with heat do give off a wide spectrum of EM radiation, with the uppermost frequency being proportional to the object's temperature. A very cold object might only give off radio waves. Room temperature objects, like you, glow in the infrared. Above 500C or so, objects start glowing visibly red, then orange and yellow. A phenomenon we call incandescence.
Objects that absorb light can and often do increase in heat, PV panels turn some of the energy that strikes them as light into electrical energy rather than thermal energy.
Actually there's also the mirror based solar which boils water in a central column.
It's cooler than that; they use the heat to make molten salt, then use a heat exchanger to boil water with that, the salt gets stupid hot and holds energy into the night.
its basically a bowl of water made of solar panels, i mean it not a bad idea at all but its nothing crazy either.
Solar and wind biggest energy revolution is not needing to boil water
Hydro doesn't boil water, either. Just moves it around.
Solar uses radiation not just heat.
"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." -Uranium, Star Wars
I’d like to thank some post on Mastadon, which really boiled down how and what a nuclear power plant works to provide power.. the little things.
You've probably heard of an internal combustion engine, like what power cars and airplanes. Well there's such a thing as an external combustion engine - a steam engine. A steam engine just needs some source of high pressure steam, the source of heat you find to boil the necessary water is almost a separate problem. You could use a wood fire, a coal fire, an oil fire, a natural gas fire. I've seen a small steam engine that runs on a tea candle. Heat from a geothermal vent, concentrated sunlight, or nuclear power.
How about a diesel engine? Large oceangoing vessels with 2-stroke diesel engines the size of a duplex put out a lot of waste heat, plenty enough to boil water and run a steam turbine engine. The diesel engine provides main propulsion, the steam engine powered by its exhaust provides electricity. Ships with such a system can shut down their aux engines while underway saving tons of fuel per voyage.
What is worst is that if we look deeper, we find out that everything is just turning the mill
The only advance would be solar that was capable of not using a mill that have to turn.... Everything else? Just a fucking mill
Solar and batteries (chemical). If we could harness lightening then that's come without mechanical energy as well. There's biological energy as well, we don't have a way to extract it directly as electricity but it exists
Mechanical and heat is just the most common way to get electricity for us at the moment.
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