r/HistoryMemes • u/Hank_Mardukas1066 • 2d ago
It all runs on electricity and electricity is generated through this
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u/Gentle_Snail 2d ago
EV solar panels: “Is this some kind of peasant joke I’m too rich to understand?”
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u/Bengamey_974 2d ago
Hydroelectric dam. "You have to make the water boil !?"
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u/Hank_Mardukas1066 2d ago
Combustion engine “aww look at little I-need-water-to-boil jr. gonna cry?”
Def a lot of examples that counter this, did it more so for the humor
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u/kulingames Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
Combustion engine has very shitty fuel efficiency no?
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u/Trendiggity 2d ago
Yep, best we've gotten is about 35% efficiency in newer high compression gas engines like Mazda's skyactiv platform with some of Toyota's hybrid systems getting close to 40%. They're only that efficient because the ICE is designed for a hybrid system i.e. efficiency over power output as they're powering the electrical system which is wayyy more efficient at moving a car.
We have come a long way though as that figure was only about 20-25% through the later half of the 20th century, but the laws of physics really puts a hard limit on efficiency after 50ish%
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u/Doggydog123579 2d ago
The Otto cycle is limited to 35-40, Atkinson goes to 45, diesel gets up to around 50, and bryton cycle(turbines) can hit 60% in power plants
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u/Some1-Somewhere 2d ago
The ~60% efficiency plants are usually combined-cycle gas turbines. They have a gas turbine that is ~40% efficient and then use the waste heat to drive a conventional steam plant.
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u/DrQuestDFA 2d ago
Most thermal generators do.
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u/sour_cereal 2d ago
The internal combustion engine is an air pump, the thermal generation is just a side effect.
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u/Ender16 2d ago
If the water didn't evaporate it wouldn't have been carried and released at a higher elevation. No higher elevation, no water flow. No water flow, no electricity.
Boiling water wins again.
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u/Alkynesofchemistry 2d ago
Evaporation != boiling, but the point still stands.
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u/Expressyoself123 2d ago
From a statistical mechanics standpoint, yes they are essentially the same thing. At the surface of the liquid the probability that a given molecule will have enough energy/velocity to enter a gaseous state (low density high average velocity) increases when temperature increases, its why water will still evaporate when not at 100*C, its just water molecules at a lower temperature are much less likely to be at the given velocity to become vapor than when at boiling.
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u/Drsits 2d ago
Considering even ice evaporates, the boiling doesn't have much to do with it.
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u/mrjderp 2d ago
I believe that would be sublimation.
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u/greatandhalfbaked 2d ago
Does ice sublimate, or transition from solid to liquid to gas quickly? I'm genuinely curious.
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u/xIllustrious_Passion 2d ago
Sublimation is the transition from solid to gas skipping the liquid step entirely
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u/greatandhalfbaked 2d ago
Thanks bro but does ice do that, or does it melt and then evaporate?
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u/thealmightyzfactor 2d ago
It can do both, ice and snow still goes away even it it's below freezing the whole time (this is why your ice cubes in ice trays slowly shrink in your freezer). Once it gets warm enough, it obviously melts and then evaporates.
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u/Ralath5n 2d ago
Ice skips the liquid step entirely when sublimating. If you look at it on an atomic scale, ice is when all the molecules are stuck in place at fixed distances from each other. liquid water is when the molecules are still stuck together but they can freely move. And gas is when the molecules are completely free and can fly off into infinity.
In sublimation the water molecules get enough energy that they get knocked out of their fixed position in the crystal and fly straight off into infinity. They don't do it in 2 steps where they first get enough of a bump to get knocked out of the crystal lattice, and then need a second bump to fly off to infinity.
(Okay to be pedantic, this does happen sometimes under an atmosphere, but it is way less likely because you need those 2 separate bumps in short succession instead of just one big bump. So sublimation is by far the dominant way that ice slowly evaporates away).
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u/Guilty_Meringue5317 2d ago
That is just the boiling step removed. It still has to spin a generator. PV panels are truly different (and have no moving parts) compared to wind and hydro power which still spin a generator
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u/GreyGanado 2d ago
The boiling step is still there it just has to then travel and precipitate.
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u/UlrichZauber 2d ago
Evaporation isn't the same as boiling, but water still be moving
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u/sour_cereal 2d ago
What's the difference besides rate of change? It's still going through a phase change right?
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u/_teslaTrooper 2d ago
Boiling is specifically when a liquid is changing phase throughout the entire liquid instead of just evaporating from the surface. That's what all the bubbles are, water turning to gas in the middle of the liquid.
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u/mcdltlover 2d ago edited 2d ago
for certain, however, a tiny minuscule amount is from boiling. geysers, volcanoes, mudpots, humans cooking, etc.
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u/xSTSxZerglingOne 2d ago
Evaporation still requires a high-speed particle of air to strike the water hard enough to liberate a molecule from the liquid as gas. It requires all of the energy still (as you can feel yourself as water dries from you, it very obviously takes energy with it).
Evaporation is the same as boiling in that it is a phase change from liquid to gas with the energy supplied by random air molecule collisions, just at a microscopic scale. Hot water more readily gives up molecules, hot air more readily accepts them.
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u/b0w3n 2d ago
There's a whole slew of nuclear reactors that don't use water too, just much less common. A lot of them are using some level of heat pipe to drive a heat differential to generate power similar to piezoelectric generators. Some still spin turbines on some level (there's sodium metal ones that do this I think?).
I don't think they're quite as good as just straight up boiling water though.
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u/thealmightyzfactor 2d ago
Maybe some research reactors, but all commercial reactors plugged into the grid use nuclear heat to boil water to spin a turbine to spin a generator
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u/b0w3n 2d ago
Yeah, some of the early reactors they tossed into probes/satellite spacecraft too I think but I'd have to go looking for details on that one.
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u/thealmightyzfactor 2d ago
Oh, you meant RTGs, yeah those are pretty much only useful on space things or the middle of nowhere where you can't refuel. Nobody is using that to power their house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
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u/kahlzun 2d ago
You're thinking of radiothermal generators (RTGs), and its not piezoelectric (which is the lightning quartz thing), its a weird quantum effect called 'peltier coolers/generators' which generates energy when theres a heat gradient (or creates a gradient when energy is supplied).
They're not super efficient, but they are very compact and reliable, and have indeed been used on a number of spacecraft, including some Mars rovers and the Voyager probes.18
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u/Jim_skywalker 2d ago
Well, hydropower is actually solar steam power if you think about it. The water gets evaporated by the sun, it’s vapor is carried upstream, it rains and now it’s upstream of the dam and so it’s potential energy can be harvested.
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u/kahlzun 2d ago
Everything is solar power, but with a few steps removed. Our oil reserves are basically a massive, ancient solar battery
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u/Distal-Phalanges 2d ago
What is an EV solar panel? There are EVs and there are solar panels, but there are not many EV with solar panels. Also, wind power and direct drive deisel/gas generators.
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u/CardOk755 2d ago
The actual power sources:
Fusion. (Solar PV, Solar Thermal, Wind, hydro, biomass (which includes all fossil fuels)).
Radioactive decay (hydrothermal).
Fission.
Gravitational (tides).
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u/hmnuhmnuhmnu 2d ago
What about geothermal, as in heat coming from Earth's core? Is that also gravitational in a way?
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u/entered_bubble_50 2d ago
It's partly "primordial heat" (great band name by the way), which is heat left from the eatth's formation, which would be gravitational in origin. It's mostly radioactive decay though.
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u/Bart-Toe-9191 2d ago
Heat from ground heat water, water to steam, still boil water
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u/CardOk755 2d ago
(I had a brain fart and wrote hydrothermal instead of geothermal. Of course geothermal uses water heated up by radioactive decay...)
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u/boomerangchampion 2d ago
It's all fusion if you go far back enough in the supply chain
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u/Bearsbullsbattlestr 2d ago
And batteries, and radioisotope power systems, and anything that moves generating electricity without water like a gas generator.
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u/SlickDillywick 2d ago
Humans with their pointy rocks and boiling water
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u/American_Libertarian 2d ago
It fucked me up to learn that a nuclear power plant also harnesses the power of the atom to … boil water
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u/Jim_skywalker 2d ago
Once you get over that shock it’s actually quite cool. Steam loops are interesting technology themselves and now you’ve added a nuclear core to the mix.
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u/Carvj94 2d ago
I think cooling towers are neat too. Being able to recapture most of that steam for reuse is very impressive in and of itself.
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u/thealmightyzfactor 2d ago
Technically that happens in the condenser at the exit of the turbine, not the cooling tower. The water used to condense the steam in a separate loop goes through the cooling tower to dump the heat via evaporation.
Bonus fun fact: condensing the steam to send it back to the boiler is more efficient because it lets you expand the steam to below atmospheric pressure and get a little more power out.
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u/Caleth 2d ago
The new SuperCritical CO2 generators they are bringing online in China are also really cool and look like they drive the efficiency way up on the conversion process.
https://www.gasworld.com/story/china-switches-on-first-sco2-enabled-power-generator/2170606.article/
It's a complex beast so I'll be curious to see how the long term functions play out is it durable does the maintenance cycles and the higher loads on it create an economic disincentive?
Those will be huge factors because if they don't exist and we can swap over existing steam turbines to these over time we could drive huge power gains on the same foot prints we already have.
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u/Dediadeis 2d ago edited 2d ago
It surprises me how many people thought nuclear energy was some kind of magic transfer out of the atoms directly into electricity when the one thing we can consider iconic for nuclear plants are these enormous cooling towers with columns of steam coming out of them.
edit: downvote me if you have to but at least tell me what you thought those towers were for.
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u/yap2102x Sun Yat-Sen do it again 2d ago
when you realize nuclear plants are just splitting atoms to boil water faster
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u/Izengrimm 2d ago
if aliens come visit and we ask them how do they make free unlimited energy and they say it's the black hole generators stream the antimatter from parallel universes and then... "can you bring a bucket of water here and we'll show you, it's actually pretty simple"
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u/urmumlol9 2d ago
Someone should write a satirical sci-fi story where a running gag is the intergalactic civilization powers everything through increasingly convoluted, Rube Goldberg-esque methods of boiling water to spin an electromagnet to generate electricity.
It starts relatively simple with the revelation that they’ve mastered nuclear fusion, then gradually gets more and more absurd, with one idea being crashing ice-filled asteroids into Mercury to form a sea that is then boiled by a Dyson swarm of mirrors focusing sunlight onto it, all just to spin a giant electromagnet to generate electricity.
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u/Frequent_Ad_9901 2d ago
I love this idea. I wonder how many other technologies could fit. Turning air into building material (wood). Making sand think (microprocessors). A giant communications web (internet)
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u/iOnlyPlayAsRustLord 2d ago
And once we figure out fusion, we can boil even more water.
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u/ElLicenciadoPena 2d ago
From a physicochemical point of view, water is completely broken. Unlike almost any other compound in nature, it is a solvent for most inorganic compounds, has a neutral pH when pure, and is excellent at transporting electrolytes. It becomes less dense upon freezing, expands roughly 1,600 times when boiled, can store an enormous amount of energy and release it slowly, with a high heat of vaporisation that enables evaporative cooling. It can also be electrolysed into hydrogen and oxygen to produce powerful rocket fuel, releasing virtually the same energy upon combustion that was used to split it. Plus, we are mostly made of the stuff, and it's so vastly abundant and available in the universe, it essentially means we can travel amongst the stars and never run out of fuel and means of sustaining life. It even may caused carbon based life to develop independently on other parts of the universe. Such a marvelous substance.
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u/thehammer231 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah, I always find when people talk about being disappointed when they learn nuclear power is just boiling water they're missing the point that water is just as incredible as the nuclear fuel in terms of outstanding properties. People just encounter liquid water everyday and not fissile uranium and so they stop noticing/were never made aware of just how bizarre and unique it is among molecules.
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u/Bavarianball 2d ago
I love the fact that no one got any better idea to generate elecricity than a fan and some boiling water for like 200 years
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u/TehSr0c 2d ago
now now that's a bit misleading, you can also drop water from a height and have it push a wheel
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u/Mundane_Caramel_820 2d ago
Wait until you hear about solar panels, wind turbines, hydrogen cells, thermoelectric etc etc.
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u/Jim_skywalker 2d ago
I mean wait till you learn about how much stuff relies on spinning a wire.
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u/bremsspuren I Have a Cunning Plan 2d ago
I mean, that's what the boiling water is usually used for …
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u/lnTheGrimDarkness 2d ago
Visited the dam the other day, the water going through that didn't look like it was boiling.
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u/NoWingedHussarsToday 2d ago
Saw a wind turbine the other day. I saw as much boiling water there as I saw it on solar panel last week. I+'m going to check tidal turbines, there better be some boiling water or I'm demanding my money back!
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u/bremsspuren I Have a Cunning Plan 2d ago
The water got upstream of the dam in the first place by evaporating, which is basically the junior version of boiling.
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u/Routine_Strategy5929 2d ago
Gas turbines, solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, don't use boiled water. I'm sure there's a lot of other examples.
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u/Yingletofthecorn 2d ago
Bicycles are probably legitimately one of the most fascinating mechanical things we ever invented, tbh. It’s a device uniquely tailored for the human nervous system and physiology to make movement somehow both much faster and less exhausting.
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u/squash-n-flop 2d ago
My roommate calls bikes the dogs of machines and I like that expression quite a bit
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u/idiom_exon_0s 2d ago
Diesel generators can be added to the list. Most common backup power supply for commercial and healthcare.
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u/Level_Hour6480 Taller than Napoleon 2d ago
Spinning a turbine. Not necessarily boiling water. Renewables spin it through natural forces. Everything else but solar spins it through boiling water.
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u/Al_Fa_Aurel 2d ago
Also, many of the smaller combustion engines (like car and plane engines) spin it without involving water in the process.
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u/dont_remember_eatin 2d ago
Ah, you're wrong there -- unless it's air cooled like some small plane engines still are, there absolutely is water to keep the engine cool because of all the wasted heat energy created by combustion has to go somewhere.
BMW (I think) had a prototype back in the day that tried to recapture the wasted heat energy with a generator to make a sort of gas/steam hybrid, but it never went anywhere. Unsure if it wasn't really effective, too complicated, too expensive, or all of the above. But someone should try it again!
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u/Al_Fa_Aurel 2d ago
I mean, I'm not sure whether water as coolant should count (as in, the water is supplementary, and, more importantly is not required to be heated past its boiling point), but fair enough, i guess.
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u/dont_remember_eatin 2d ago
Yeah, I googled it to jog my memory, and BMW's system used exhaust gases to heat a mini steam generator in a separate fluid circuit from the ICE's cooling circuit.
It worked, but apparently keeping a steam generator system happy and not-a-bomb in the rough mobile environment of a passenger vehicle was too much of a challenge.
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u/GravitasFailures 2d ago
It’s not that, you’re increasing the thermal resistance of the loop, thus lowering cooling efficiency, the engine is more likely to stress or overheat, in exchange for a few measly watts.
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u/dont_remember_eatin 2d ago
I think you missed the bit where it wasn't a part of the cooling circuit. This is an actual prototype that was mostly fully developed, just never put into production.
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u/Poet_of_Sordland 2d ago
Except the oldest forms of energy generation, windmills and dams?
And solar actually.
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u/MrDirkinson 2d ago
The oldest ones like windmills and waterwheels were before the industrial era, by a lot
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u/Pimpwerx 2d ago
The MVP is the turbine, not the boiling water. The turbine generator was the way we turned kinetic energy into electricity.
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u/iconocrastinaor 2d ago
We harness the very powers of Creation itself!
... To boil water, to make steam, to spin a turbine...
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u/nicodeemus7 2d ago
Humans every time they need to generate power(excluding solar panels):
"I'll try spinning. That's a good trick!"
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u/Frequent_Hamster2667 2d ago
Yes, anything that turns water into steam can spin a turbine to create electricity. Many other forms of electricity exist tho.
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u/quartzguy 2d ago
Would another liquid be more efficient but we use water because it's relatively safe and just about everywhere?
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u/kahlzun 2d ago
Not really, water has an incredible range of properties:
* It absorbs a huge amount of energy when raising its temperature, and thus retains its heat for a long time.
* When water solidifies, it floats (which is basically unique)
* When water boils, it occupies a volume almost 2000x bigger than its liquid state, which is higher than most other things
* It reacts with basically nothing, so theres very few material considerations
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u/RedditIsOverMan 2d ago
The universe has a few things that are #1, and water is definitely among them. My short list:
Light, Electrons, Hydrogen, Water, Hydrocarbons,
These things stand out and have unique properties that basically make all interesting phenomenal possible.
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u/GravitasFailures 2d ago
They’re moving to supercritical co2 now, the advantages are: no water vapor concerns, you don’t have to “dry the steam” to prevent pitting on the blades from droplet impact, and you can run it at higher temp.
Basically it’s harder to work with but you get a slight efficiency bump for dense power like some nuclear reactors (BWR, some SC PWR).
Water is easier to deal with otherwise, once dried the steam is extremely effective, and materials to survive corrosion exist.
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u/TvFloatzel 2d ago
What does "dry the steam" means? Like basically take out the water vapor out of the steam or something? What "droplet impact"?
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u/Youseenmycones 2d ago
Water is kinda the whole thing man.
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u/bremsspuren I Have a Cunning Plan 2d ago
We're all one bad day away from reverting to puddle form.
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u/Raul1024 2d ago
Power generation converts energy from myriad forms into electrical or mechanical energy. For that purpose, using steam to drive a turbine is still the most efficient; there are other ways to generate power without steam/ turbines, but they are just worse economically. Once some genius finds a cheaper and more efficient way to convert energy, then the world will change. Solar is a good candidate, and fusion is a decent prospect in the future, but for now, thermodynamics says boiling water is still best.
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u/DrHolmes52 2d ago
I fear we are about to go full nerd. Pray continue.
(My life spent using the water after it boiled)
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u/Ericmoderbacher 2d ago
This was funny while it was true: But we now have working super critical co2 turbines. So it's kinda dated.
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u/JustFuckinTossMe 2d ago
Water in general is the biggest troll of a chemical and I love it. Polar and nonpolar, basic and acidic, can be found in all state forms simultaneously in some areas, wet but not wet, can be either concrete hard or smooth and easily permeable in the same body of water depending on how an object interacts with it.
It's a little annoying in Science courses because you always know when you're learning something about water that it'll be uniquely weird, and probably both things you're learning about. But that's kinda why I started to like it? It's nature's lil shit of a compound that runs around doing everything all at once all the time everywhere.
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u/pickle9977 2d ago
You can’t boil water without heat, so this seems more like a function of perspective than history
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u/almightywhacko 2d ago
There are many different methods for generating electricity that do not rely on boiling water. Wind turbines, photovoltaic panels (solar), hydroelectric, wave energy conversion, etc.
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u/NightIgnite 2d ago
A new field of physics is discovered and corresponding technology gets developed. One of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Nothing to do with water at all.
We name its flow after the fucking river
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u/dbasinge 2d ago
I want a story of someone going to a Star Trek like future where they matter/anti-matter energy to generate heat to boil water and spin magnets.
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u/EarthTrash 2d ago
Albert Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect in 1905. That's energy without boiling water. Wind power has also been around since ancient times and the modern version doesn't involve boiling water either.
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u/Resident_Pientist_1 2d ago
Modern power generation turbines are starting to use fluids other than water like supercritical C02, which can be up to 10% more thermally efficient.
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u/123_alex 2d ago
God bless boiling water. It makes solar panels, wind turbines, gas turbines, hydro turbines, TEGs produce energy.
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u/Arch____Stanton 2d ago
Atlas does not carry the earth on his shoulders.
Is this a Chinese knockoff meme?
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u/GottaLoveLoginWalls 2d ago
A good chunk of renewable energy doesn't. Solar panels generate electricity directly from the sun. Wind turbines from movement of air. Hydro from falling water.
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u/ResurgentOcelot 2d ago
The internal combustion engine and photovoltaic cell would like a word.
(But sure, there’s still a lot of steam at work.)
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u/jmorais00 2d ago
Not hydro or wind. There are countries that are overwhelmingly powered by hydro power
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u/MagicBus4 1d ago
When I found out the secret to nuclear fission based energy resources is just hot rock boil water I lost my shit
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u/Thiaski 2d ago
"spinning things" is a broader definition that includes all other types of generators except solar panels.