I have heard of very few sources of energy that do not rely on turbines. Solar is the big one but one of the ones that might be most interesting in future is 'plug flow.' Much like with solar and other non-chemical systems, the challenge seems to be scale, because there is just an insane amount of energy density in hydrocarbons, so much that we can run our society on them while wasting huge amounts of it. But if we could find ways to scale these kinds of effects, it would pull energy from natural cycles, like a dam, but with fewer moving parts. It's still using solar energy with conversions but maybe it'd use less REM.