Comment by dlcarrier

Comment by dlcarrier 3 days ago

2 replies

Pretty much every power plant heats water to steam, then uses steam turbines to generate power. This is also how nuclear submarines and arcraft carriers work.

We never left the steampunk era.

gpm 3 days ago

We're leaving it now, the majority of new energy capacity is now solar, and not steam based (>70% in 2024). And a non-trivial chunk of the remainder is wind (also not steam based).

  • pfdietz 3 days ago

    And in the US of the part that's still fossil based, new capacity is combustion turbine based, which at most gets a minority share of its power from a steam bottoming cycle.