Anyways power plants use steam to drive a turbine, so why not make the steam by heating the pipes with electricity. Just like an electric stove does when you boil water. Then the turbine will spin an axle which spins other axles (ones that don’t conduct electricity) that power many other generators, a couple of those generators will make the electricity needed to heat up the steam, while the other generators make the rest of the electricity. Oh, and if anyone has already though of that then I can only say that i didn’t plagiarize.
7 Responses
I think you should definitely go though with that’s awesome!
Short answer… It sucks!
won’t work, you see in physics we have this thing called the laws of thermodynamics. which talk about how energy changes over time. ultimately there is always some energy loss, so you can’t actually cycle the electricity back into the heating element without losing some energy in the process, essentially the plant would run down and stop working because there is no more energy left to heat the water.
Your perpetual motion machine scheme will not work. You always need to put in more energy than you can get out. The generators making the electricity to heat the water in the pipes will consume more energy thatn the steam driven generators can produce. That is the way that physics works.
Every week on answers there are people asking questions about this. It appeals to the uninitiated, and is generally called a “perpetual motion machine”. Stop and think about it. If it works, do you think no one else thought of it before, and do you think it wouldn’t already be used? The reason it won’t work is because you cannot get something for nothing, in the physical world anyway. This is explained in detail by the laws of thermodynamics, but basically it is impossible to convert one form of energy to another without losses. You always get out less than what you put in. So a heater may be 95% efficient, the boiler 70%, the turbine 70%, the generator 90%. Overall, these figures here work out to 42% efficient, and they are optimistic values at that. If you put your hand near any of these they are hot. That represents waste energy, heat being lost. It is unavoidable.
You will find sites on the internet claiming they have achieved this “free energy”. Most of them are scams, trying to sell a set of instructions or just get you to click on their page for advertising revenue or to download a trojan. Some are just plain nutters. They are often easily recognised by the pseudo technical terms used, grammatical errors, praise from customers (their mother?) and are apparently seriously published (in the nonsense webzine put out by themselves just for the purpose).
Hope that gives a better understanding, and something for others to read too.
I hate to burst your bubble and disturb you from your dreaming but there is something called “Efficiency of input and output†to which every energy consuming device (like engines, turbines, motors, electrical lines, etc.) is subjected and by the time you get your electricity at you home outlet from the powerhouse generators the overall energy efficiency loss is about 60% and therefore you have only 40% left. Putting it in simpler terms, imagine that you have a tank of 100 gallons full of water but because of operational factors involved you would be able to use only 40 gallons of water; the rest 60% would be losses attributed to mechanical, physical, operational and other demands.
This is putting it very simply and without mentioning anything about thermodinamic laws.
In thermodynamics, one basic principle is “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
You can’t get more energy out of a system than you put in. As a matter of fact, you can’t break even either. You always lose some energy somewhere.
Put another way, “There’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.” Many people have tried. No one has ever succeeded. Sorry.