Thread by @25_cycle

#ResistanceEarth
#ClimateBrawl
There's a lot of misunderstanding on electrical power generation, it's part of the reason why many think wind power is more expensive or requires more infrastructure, even though the oposite is true. So let's get electricity generation!
1/17

Take a coil of wire- spin a magnet inside of it, and you generate electricity.
Thank you folks, you've been a blast, good night!
2/17

Okay, so it's a bit more complicated than that (and more about that way later), we need to spin that magnet.
There's a lot of ways to spin that magnet, and most of those involve generating high pressure steam. (I'll do hydropower later)

3/17

1) Boil water- You want to boil it really hot, the higher the temperature the more aggressively that steam will push through the turbine blades.
2) Recover the remaining steam - you need serious plumbing to capture the stuff coming out of the other side of the turbine.
4/17

This is a "closed loop", you need to prevent pressure escaping and destroying everything it touches.
3) To boil that water you need to burn a fossil fuel, or carefully control a nuclear reactor to dance on the edge between producing steam and destroying itself.
5/17

More plumbing we need to work with, the exhaust combustion gas stream. That's the biggest source of global pollution we have, belching coal, crude oil, and hydrocarbon byproduct wastes. This is now another set of infrastructure complexity.
6/17

4) We're not finished yet!
You've got to mine or drill for that fuel, then you have to process it, refine it, store it, transport it, distribute it, store it temporarily in multiple locations before you reach the power plant, and then store it in the power plant.
7/17

5) Each of those steps have the possibility of loss, or contamination. Sometimes, those can get really bad. Millions of barrels polluting the oceans, rivers, & eventually landing on beaches & in water tables.
8/17

It takes forever to completely flush it from the system, and it creates a lot of environmental damage outside of just how it effects us.
The infrastructure needed is spectacular and it has material and environmental issues throughout the entire spectrum.
9/17

Now to wind- the wind blows a turbine, which spins inside of a coil, generates electricity. No boilers, no closed loop plumbing, no waste heat stream, no exhausts. No storage tanks, no pipelines, no pumps to move the hydrocarbon stream, or systems to pulverize coal to dust.
10/17

And we don't have to worry about fly ash, or polluting the atmosphere with heavy metals, or Carbon monoxide, volatile organics, nitrous oxides, ozone, & generating PM2.5 particulates that have horrifying health and mortality issues.
11/17

he magnet inside of a wind turbine can use a permanent magnet or an electromagnet, just like steam turbines. It's not a "rare earth" issue, both are the same, there's no special need. Another knock on turbines is they rely on "fossil fuels" for lubrication.
12/17

If petrochemicals are so critical for our way of life, why are we burning them? The gears & bearings on wind turbines need lube, but there's no blowback from combustion fouling the oil, very easily filtered & reused- it's a lot harder to reuse the oil in steam turbines.
13/17

Hydropower doesn't require steam turbines, it relies on gravity to drop water through a turbine therefore it's "renewable" based on rain. The advantage of hydro is it's "two way", you can use power to move water up, for you to use it later to generate electricity
14/17

"Pumped Hydro" or "gravity storage" has been used to store energy since the 1890s. It's a low tech solution, easily scaled, can use existing infrastructure or easily added. There's a constellation of energy storage technologies available they don't have to be lithium only.
15/17

Nuclear has it's own issues, mostly dealing with the need for redundancy and waste heat streams/ nuclear is very expensive, there's a future here if it can be made cheaper and more reliably.
Solar PV has one moving part, electrons.
(Okay, they have directional panels...)
16/17

This was very simplified, more an intro than a full explainer; if you have any questions or comments, please feel free. So thanks for your, I hope I've helped reduce wind power anxiety and helped people understand why onshore wind is the cheapest energy currently available.
17/17