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Let's consider a coal-fired power plant. Here we have a boiler that burns coal to produce steam.

The boiler radiates heat and this radiant heat loss causes an efficiency penalty - about 1% of the energy in the coal is lost in radiation.

Moisture that was in the coal to start with (and even moisture in the air because of humidity) gets heated up in the boiler but does not contribute to the process of combustion. This also causes and efficiency loss.

Instead of being properly burned up un the furnace, some of the coal particles just fall to the bottom of the furnace, and is collected along with the ash.

The steam that the boiler produced goes to a turbine that spins like a fan because of the pressure in the steam. The turbine drives a generator that produces the electricty that comes out of the power plant. Both the turbine and boiler have some losses due to friction, but the main loss in the turbine is the energy in the steam leaving the exhaust of the turbine.

Because we want to condense this steam back into water so we can re-use it for supplying the boiler, the energy lost from the exhaust of the turbine actually makes its way to the cooling tower before being rejected into the atmosphere.

It seems inefficienct to do it this way, but it's the best method we have at the moment.

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12y ago

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