Comment by rawgabbit
3 days ago
I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.
3 days ago
I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.
I don't have numbers to quote at you, but I would assume not. Fundamentally coal, nuclear, and gas-boiler (but not gas-turbine) power plants work the same way - you heat up water until it boils, and run the steam through a turbine to turn that heat into mechanical energy. I.e. the "cooling" is also the electricity generation mechanism. As a result same amount of heat should result in the basically same amount of electricity for each process, and since the water is being used in the same way they should be pretty much equal in water (use or consumption)/electricity output efficiency assuming they were built with the same era of technology...
I was mentally referring to this article. It mentioned that natural gas plants only used one tenth that of coal. I assumed this is because natural gas plants are newer etc.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698
Yeah, that's the gas turbine thing. The first-stage (which generates the majority of the power) isn't boiling water, but extracting energy directly from pressure from burning the gas in a jet-engine like fashion.
The coal/nuclear like natural gas is what is labelled as "Steam Turbine" in the chart in this article: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61444
Looks like it's already a small minority.
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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.
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).
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.