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Turbines are our friends (media.piefed.social)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 5 points 7 months ago (13 children)

Would solar boilers be more efficient than PV?

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (8 children)

    No, neither will it be cheaper.

    People stopped building those some years ago.

    (But those incredibly expensive concentrators with a single tower are more efficient. Nobody is building those anymore either.)

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I assume not efficient enough to justify cost

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Turns out that sunlight is very cheap. You need a lot of efficiency to justify any extra cost.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Plus, you get a lot of lag when heating water with concentrated solar. Overnight your water cools down, so you need time to get it back to boiling temperature before it can generate any power. That lag gets worse during winter and cloudy days

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    In some ways, that lag is good. You can cheaply replace batteries with just a thermal mass.

    But it's not good enough to make up for the cost difference.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    They used to be cheaper. Solar is bananas cheap now

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Generating electricity by boiling water used to be the cheapest option, but nowadays it's a bottleneck that itself is way more expensive than the alternatives that people actually build.

    It only got cheaper with time, though. It's the alternatives (PV, wind, batteries, gas) that improved a crazy amount.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Another thread I read said that photovoltaics have an efficiency of around 45%, while turbines are somewhere in the 40% range. Source: I dunno.

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