When it comes to efficiency, heat engines can be quite efficient here on earth in ambient gas or liquid states in terms of what fuel costs and process efficiency. This is because thermal equilibrium is with the environment, not absolute zero and in fact there is not a low thermal resistance path to the cold of space or we wouldn’t have our climates as we know them. This is why
exergy or process efficiency has been known to mechanical engineering for well over a century and has been called exergy for 70ish years. What this means is instead of absolute efficiency, 1 - (lowtempK/hightempK) it’s 1 - (ambienttempK/hightempK).
This reflects reality in that you can’t reject heat to a lower temperature, but when you don’t pay for or in some real way render important the absolute view, it adds nothing to the understanding. This is why heat pumps can have 300% efficiency, it’s not a gimmick, it’s the reality of getting 2x the energy you paid for free by extracting it from ambient. Many electric cars use electric heat pumps because it’s so efficient.
Back to commercial power, every real process will have a discharge temperature above ambient as the gradient of temperature drives heat flow. This heat isn’t magic, special, or stamped on molecules, rather it’s only maybe low double digits of exergy wise. This is still enough to build a new system over the heat source above ambient and extract more energy but now it’s much less energy and vastly larger surface area so the heat flux drops like a stone. Commercial plants come with multiple states because fuel costs determine the bottom line, making exergy the most sensible approach. This means if you can take 3 extra stages of heat extraction and replace them with 2 you either save massively on construction costs, or perhaps wirh 3 stages eek out another 1 or 2% efficiency and save millions on fuel costs. This technology likely is going to apply to fusion reactors as most designs just use the proven and insanely efficient 80-90% process efficiency.