Years of engineering went into designing intricate steam turbines and cooling loops to capture as much usable energy from heat as possible and convert it into electricity.
Because electricity is the most practical form of energy, which you can easily convert into motion, chemical energy, light computation, anything you like. And you can reroute it from one use to abother in less than a second.
It feels so wrong to turn that electricity back into heat to boil water.
And yet, electric kettles
@wolf480pl transferring electricity is orders of magnitude more efficient than transferring heat
@skells yeah but there's also gas. Which would be awesome if it wasn't from Russia
@wolf480pl bit racist but ok
@skells it's not about the nation it's about the state, its government, its foreign policy, and how they're using gazprom as a means of exerting pressure on other states
@wolf480pl eh, the lines become blurred from our perspective but I there's plenty to fight about at the top, even supposing a highly conspiratorial world.
in any case, these empires aren't evil; they're just empires, and they behave as they always have.
make no mistake though, a flawed democracy is infinitely preferable to even a well run autocracy imo
@skells yeah, "evil" was a gross oversimplification.
In any case, where I live, Putin controlling the gas supply has been a problem on multiple occasions. I don't know whether it'd be better or worse if it was USA president controlling it.
@wolf480pl the irony is that the green movement precipitated it, not to say that they didn't have good reasons, just that getting off of green AND nuclear at the same time was a tough ask
@skells not to mention that solar and wind also harm the environment, but in hard-to-quantify ways so it's not a simple comparison between them and nuclear.
@wolf480pl I know mining the minerals for solar can be very damaging, didn't know wind can cause problems?
@skells IIRC wind turbines kill birds and make noise that scares animals off. But don't quote me on that, I haven't read much on the topic.
Also worth looking into is the production process for the PV panels and wind turbines, how much materials and energy it takes, how much waste it creates, and how do you dispose of a broken PV panel or wind turbine, then divide that by expected lifetime of the device.
+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@wolf480pl @skells fwiw cats kill more birbs than wind turbines, by magnitudes.
the thing with those power sources is that there isn't a one size fits all solution. wind energy in northern germany makes much more sense than in e.g. southern germany.
@bonifartius @skells yeah ideally we'd have a healthy mix of whatever makes sense in a particular place. It doesn't have to be 100% sun&wind or 100% nuclear
@JapanAnon @skells
not to mention the insane amounts of electricity storage you'd need to smooth out the times when there's not much sunlight and wind.
@skells i guess it helps a bit when everything is controlled by the same evil empire instead of 2 warring evil empires