Cooling for Power Stations a Global Cooling System

In 2023, Electricity is essential to the continuation of civilised human life on the planet. Not only does it provide lighting, heating, and cooling almost everywhere in the world – it is now used in really every field – medicine, computing, accountancy, home appliances, industry, policing, cookery, refrigeration, all sorts of travel, and communication, the internet and cell-phones…

At present, 90% of the world’s electric power comes from power stations which work as follows:

A combustible substance, such as coal, oil, or wood, or a substance capable of providing heat by nuclear fission is employed to create heat energy in a furnace.

This heat energy is transmitted to air. As the air is heated it expands forcefully into a turbine, causing the turbine to turn as it passes through. The faster the turbine turns, the more electrical energy is generated.  Read more here.

The undesirable side-effect of this is that the heat created from the generation process has to go somewhere, otherwise the turbines would overheat, and stop working. At present, the only way of cooling the turbines is to direct a sufficient flow of air or water over them so that the heat energy is carried away from the equipment and the building in the cooling fluid.

The heat then passes into the air or water, and is dissipated from these fluids – unfortunately much more slowly than it is generated! – into the upper atmosphere, where it ceases to affect us.

There are several problems arising from this.

1. The input temperature of the cooling fluid – air or water – which is drawn into the cooling system, must be significantly lower than that of the turbines, otherwise, the heat will not move effectively from the turbines to the cooling fluid – there must be a significant difference. With Global Warming raising the temperature of the input air and water, more fuel has to be burned to raise the furnace temperature high enough to keep the turbines rotating fast enough to generate a given amount of electricity.
2. By burning more fuel in order to create the same amount of electricity, the Power Stations:
3. Have to raise the price of electricity in order to pay for the extra fuel;
4. Further increase the Global temperature uplift, because even more heat energy is created;
5. Approach or exceed the heat-output limits agreed with the appropriate authorities;
6. Encounter a further problem which I shall call the ‘Motorway Junction’ syndrome because the way I visualise it is like the flow of cars onto and off a Motorway:

α     At the entry and exit to a Power Station, the speed at which molecules move forward depends, like that of cars approaching a Motorway Junction, on the volume of traffic;

β     if the road leading to the motorway junction is reasonably empty, the cars can approach the junction reasonably fast – if it is full, they have to approach more slowly. Similarly, if the motorway itself is blocked with slow-moving cars (like the behaviour of heat molecules) the cars/molecules are forced to move more slowly;

γ    as the forward movement of the air energised by the heat-molecules is what causes the rotation of the turbines, and the speed of their rotation dictates the amount of electricity created, it can be imagined that the turbine works most efficiently when the air ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ of the turbine is relatively empty of molecules – i.e. cold… 

THEREFORE – the drawings ‘PRE- AND POST-COOLING FOR POWER STATIONS’ SHOW A COMPARATIVELY SIMPLE AND INEXPENSIVE METHOD OF BOTH REDUCING THE TEMPERATURE OF THE AIR/WATER AFTER ELECTRICITY GENERATION AND INCREASING ITS EFFICIENCY AND THEREFORE REDUCING ITS COST.

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