- 67% of raw energy is lost in conversion to electricity
- 5% of raw energy is lost in plant usage
- 9% of raw energy is lost in transmission and distribution
For now, lets assume that we can't do anything about the plant usage, transmission and distribution losses. But what about this 67%? SIXTY SEVEN PERCENT LOSS - thats awesome.
Now, any of us who have taken a Thermodynamics course understand that, mostly, this loss is inherent to any steam engine (yes, conventional and nuclear power plants are steam engines). That is, this energy is lost (to the nether land of entropy) in the conversion from thermal energy to mechanical energy. To a lesser extent there is a loss from mechanical to electrical energy as well.
This begs the question: Is a steam engine (and all its loss) a requirement of electricity production?
Obviously the answer is a flat "no." Hydro-electricity is produced without steam. The production of hydro-electricity is , arguably, detrimental to biodiversity. Its not feasible in much of the world, etc, etc, etc. So what other options are there? Are any of these elusive options more efficient than 33% at converting raw energy to electrical energy? That, my friends, is the question.
And wasn't there supposed to be Science discussed in this post? Its coming - we're all trying to be thorough.
5 comments:
The problem is that any sort of energy conversion system is going to lose you energy to entropy. You always have some sort of Thot/Tcold going on.
And why do I bother having office hours at all. I get tons of emails to have a special finals week office hour, and nobody shows up.
I'll bet pennies to the dollar that I have students show up later today and expect me to help them.
Yeah, of course you have to have some of that Thot/Tcold going on. But does it have to be 67%? Not all reactions in nature lose 67% of energy per conversion - otherwise we would all starve for want of enough calories.
What if there are other options? Biochemical? Locked up in, I don't know, waste water treatment sludge ponds (hint to the next posting)? What if you could cut your usage of electricity by considering a waste product as a solution a fuel crisis rather than a problem to clean up with fuel usage? Then you could increase the system efficiency even if the conversion efficiency were diminished.
My apologies if that is really long - which it is.
Yeah, I personally feel like the solution isn't going to necessarily be getting extreme efficiencies, but some sort of "using all parts of the buffalo" technique, where the by-products are used in their own cycles.
Although, most of the time waste heat is just waste. Even the petaflop computers they're currently designing create tons of heat, but it's still not enough to do anything useful for.
(for those not in the know, we're currently at teraflop supercomputers, or 1000X less than petaflop; flop = floating-point operation, or multiply / add of generic numbers).
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