Also, people owning worthless games nobody likes because they were bundled in with that one awesome one.

Don't be fooled that "hey they are solid state and convert directly to electricity". Deep down, it's still a physical process that produces electricity, even if the moving parts are not something you can see. In actual practice, what happens with these things produces horrible efficiency.

These electronic devices are semiconductor junctions that you get heat to flow through in hopes the electrons will bounce their way across the junction into the cooler side and get stuck... They are not efficient from a thermodynamic perspective, and unless my physical understanding of how they work is totally wrong, they are never going to approach the efficiency of even an internal combustion engine, from a thermodynamic perspective anyway.

If you read my post.... (and apparently you didn't) ... I specifically stipulate that automotive applications *might* be successful and worth of investigation. The reason I say this is because of the huge amounts of heat transferred out the tail pipe and radiator in a modern internal combustion engine at sometimes very high temperature differentials leaves something to recover. This is totally unlike a modern power plant, where heat transfer has been carefully engineered to be as efficient as possible, thus leaving little room for thermodynamic improvement. However, my doubts about automotive application are over costs, weight and complexity not about the Thermodynamics of the application.

Until these devices they describe approach the current efficiency of a power plant, there is zero chance they will be helpful on an industrial scale. Modern power plants are usually within a few percentage points of ideal so these devices are going to have to come way up the efficiency scale, and they are horrible now. Given how they work at the subatomic level (holes, electrons etc) I seriously doubt we are in any danger of reaching this level.

I'm not sure how the cooling works for PV cells. But, if they are actively cooling the liquid there is little to be gained from this arrangement and it is likely going to lead to hotter cell temperatures and cooler liquid temperatures.

So it *might* work, but only if the temperature differential they can stand is high enough and they are not expending energy to cool the liquid through some heat engine.... (I.e. if they use something like a swamp cooler or something.)

The funny (or scary) thing is, at one time one of the Cracker Jack prizes was a match shooter.

Here we go "waste heat". Please learn a bit more about thermodynamics and heat engines. Power is generated from the TRANSFER of heat. Power plants are huge heat engines, that produce electrical power by taking heat from a high temperature source, transferring that heat to a low temperature sink. There is very little WASTE in a power plant (nuclear or otherwise). Yes you have to dump heat to generate power, but it is not like you are just wasting power when you dump heat. This "waste heat" is not a free resource you can exploit to get more power from the plant.

Adding any other devices in the path of the heat flow will only impede the heat flow and drive down efficiency. I contend that the loss of efficiency will be more than the power you can generate using devices that directly convert heat transfer to electrical power. These devices are not nearly as efficient as what we have already in a modern power plant, thus there is zero chance they will be better.

If 50 min is all it takes, then why as it not happened? Surely there is some nut job out there crazy enough to do it and smart enough to pull it off. Surely... It's not like all the folks in the middle east are somehow stupid, and a lot of them have serious issues with the USA and would love nothing more than to put us all in the dark, if even for a short time. Wide spread outages, caused by somebody hacking, simply have not happened. Why? If it is so easy, surely somebody would have tried it by now because there are a lot of smart people out there who would be willing to do it.

I strongly suspect you are making stuff up now.. So this is where we stop.

If, instead of a tablet the kids had blocks and picture books, they would develop manual dexterity. Or at least provide the books and blocks and limited tablet time.

Unless the guy behind you has one too and thinks it's your fault..

Which is why I stipulate that these heat to electricity devices MIGHT be of value for internal combustion engines. The heat dumped by them is significant and the temperature differential quite high. There is at least opportunity to get something that would normally just get dumped. I just openly wonder if for a car or truck it will be worth the cost, weight and complexity it will add. I strongly suspect that it's not worth it, but I'm not totally sure.

Calm down and think about what I said. Your average power plant is pretty darn good efficiency wise (which is what I said if you don't mind reading), which is exactly what you are saying too. Yea, we've come a long way from just dumping waste steam, we have optimized things very well actually. I'm saying that there is very little room for improvement left at this point and there is NO FREE LUNCH here. These devices that convert heat flow directly to electric power are NOT going to increase the efficiency of industrial scale power plants. These devices are simply NOT EFFICIENT enough and will disrupt the current efficiency we've already designed in, they will only disrupt the heat flow, raise entropy and result in less power output for the same input. They don't help.

What on earth did I say that was incorrect? I admit to having struggled with thermodynamics class, but I believe I captured the essence of heat engines and efficiency. So you want to step down off the pedestal and discuss exactly what you think I have wrong in my understanding of thermodynamics? Or are you going to stay up there and keep yelling about how stupid everybody else is?

I wouldn't be so sure

LOL Why yes, yes we do. Like it or not.