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I work in a hospital boiler room with natural gas fired steam boilers and other heat generating equipment. Has the technology for thermoelectric improved enough to be viable for generating electricity from our heat generating equipment? We have steam water heaters, natural gas boilers for generating hot water used to heat the air in the building, and other equipment that constantly generate heat.
No. The Peltier effect is still useful for places where you need a small amount of refrigerating or heating capacity but you also only have a small amount of electric power available, or a limited space.
Think about it.
If you need to make steam the highest efficency conversion of electric power to heat is resistive heating - 100% efficiency. Can't do better than that. And yet steam plants almost universally use gas or oil or coal - something you can set on fire.
An idea that I had once, but I'm not sure about the viability of it, is to use SAND to harvest waste heat, in some way that sand could be heated to high temperatures (500 Celsius or above). Maybe using thermal insulation? I don't know... Super hot sand could then be used to boil the water for a while, instead of the gas.
I don’t think I asked the question well. I was asking about devices that uses heat to generate electricity. I was wondering if such devices have improved in electricity generation and lower cost so as to be worth the price to add to our heat generating equipment to augment our utilities.
Still the most efficient way to generate electricity is with giant generating installations. If we leave out hydro and geothermal which are (sort of) getting input power for free, you need to set something on fire or have a nuclear reaction.
Other methods including solar are best for situations where the grid isn't, or where you need mobile power generation, or other special circumstances.
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