Woah, it’s a thought that never occurred to me: turbines slow down when we use electricity. Makes sense when 1 thinks hard about it. Did you work in a power plant or something?
There’s another relevant question. When turbines rotate, they must be doing it inside a set of huge magnets; or they must themselves rotate the magnets inside a huge coil. In either case, there’s a need for magnets. As per my understanding, they can’t be electric magnets because it will destroy the purpose of generating electricity in the 1st place. So they must be natural ones. Those will decay over time because their field energy is being used all day. Therefore… theoretically, if humans exist long enough then we will run out of magnets and thus no electricity? For now I have no idea what is the Earth’s capacity for magnetic materials.
No, I never worked in a power plant or anything like it, but I have a physics background and back in school I took a class that involved a lot of modeling of the economics of electricity generation, including power grid management, and this came up.
And permanent magnets don’t get used up. The energy the gets used is the mechanical energy moving them back and forth, which ultimately comes from the fuel (coal, gas, biomass, nuclear, wind, geothermal, or solar thermal). Their magnetic field just exists, and transfers that mechanical energy to the electrons that flow through the wires in the electric grid. So that one we don’t need to worry about.
Woah, it’s a thought that never occurred to me: turbines slow down when we use electricity. Makes sense when 1 thinks hard about it. Did you work in a power plant or something?
There’s another relevant question. When turbines rotate, they must be doing it inside a set of huge magnets; or they must themselves rotate the magnets inside a huge coil. In either case, there’s a need for magnets. As per my understanding, they can’t be electric magnets because it will destroy the purpose of generating electricity in the 1st place. So they must be natural ones. Those will decay over time because their field energy is being used all day. Therefore… theoretically, if humans exist long enough then we will run out of magnets and thus no electricity? For now I have no idea what is the Earth’s capacity for magnetic materials.
No, I never worked in a power plant or anything like it, but I have a physics background and back in school I took a class that involved a lot of modeling of the economics of electricity generation, including power grid management, and this came up.
And permanent magnets don’t get used up. The energy the gets used is the mechanical energy moving them back and forth, which ultimately comes from the fuel (coal, gas, biomass, nuclear, wind, geothermal, or solar thermal). Their magnetic field just exists, and transfers that mechanical energy to the electrons that flow through the wires in the electric grid. So that one we don’t need to worry about.