Condensation run steam turbine

[Iriswaters]

 

18 minutes ago, clickrush said:

People need to realize how there is a fundamental balance tradeoff with all of this: The turbine should not have a better power to heat consumed ratio or else you could just stack aquatuners and turbines to infinitely scale up your power production.

No.  Nothing is infinite.  If the ratio were 1000 times better, you would be able to produce 1000 times more energy.  Not infinite.  These things that look like they are being infinite due to the heat being 'produced' by an aquatuner still need to put the -cold- somewhere.   They need to steal the heat from somewhere.  

1M DTU/s is an OBSCENE amount of heat.   Having that be the baseline is absurd.  Pretending that there is an infinite supply of MILLIONS of DTU/s is ridiculous.

If you stack up infinite aquatuners and steam engines, you will bring everything in your base to 0 Kelvin very quickly.  Or at the least down to the freezing temperature of supercoolant.

21 minutes ago, clickrush said:

 

With that in mind: As long as the turbine is balanced it will always feel like the power generation is a side effect when used alongside a cooling system (aquatuners/regulators/radiators etc.). Only in combination with a massive heat source it should be power positive. There is absolutely no way around this. If it cools less than now it will simply throw over the whole power generation balance, which again, can easily be demonstrated with tile blocking builds.

There are no heat sources that even come close to running a single engine.   Volcanoes produce tens of thousands of DTU/s.   Metal volcanoes actually less, since their SHC is lower.  Hot steam vents come close, maxing out at close to 1M DTU/s.   A full LOX/LOH system to turn every ounce of water your geysers make into rocket fuel will MAYBE give you 2kW, if your system is really efficient.

[clickrush]

7 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

No.  Nothing is infinite.  If the ratio were 1000 times better, you would be able to produce 1000 times more energy.  Not infinite.  These things that look like they are being infinite due to the heat being 'produced' by an aquatuner still need to put the -cold- somewhere.   They need to steal the heat from somewhere.  

I get what you mean, there are only so many things to cool and there is only so much space on an asteroid, sure. But also your power needs are finite. There is only so much power you want or can draw. What I meant there is simply: too much.

That's entirely besides the point though. My point is that the high heat requirement for the steam turbine to run is an important balance problem. If the power conversion is too high you can easily get massive surplus power, which can be demostrated by tile blocking exploit builds. The heat sources around the map and in a developed base are more than enough to just run your power based on tile blocked turbines and maybe your hydrogen generators. That's quite ridiculous as it completely shuts out a whole lot of gameplay.

However the turbine being a huge heat dump is a good thing for cooling and certainly (100%) intended. The +200°C overheat temp on steel and the ability to use it in the raw metal category came right with the space industry upgrade since there aren't any sustainable and fully scalable long term solutions for converting heat outside of the turbine (or just sheer geyser luck that lets you dump large amounts of water into space). The new space industry tech requires massive amounts of sustainable cooling. I'am not just talking about the hydrogen fuel plus oxydizer tank, but also about the hydrogen engine heat output which is ridiculously high. The steam turbine is the answer to that and also gives a more interesting and clean alternative to fixed heat temp for cooling industrial areas

[Iriswaters]

35 minutes ago, clickrush said:

I get what you mean, there are only so many things to cool and there is only so much space on an asteroid, sure. But also your power needs are finite. There is only so much power you want or can draw. What I meant there is simply: too much.

That's entirely besides the point though. My point is that the high heat requirement for the steam turbine to run is an important balance problem. If the power conversion is too high you can easily get massive surplus power, which can be demostrated by tile blocking exploit builds. The heat sources around the map and in a developed base are more than enough to just run your power based on tile blocked turbines and maybe your hydrogen generators. That's quite ridiculous as it completely shuts out a whole lot of gameplay.

However the turbine being a huge heat dump is a good thing for cooling and certainly (100%) intended. The +200°C overheat temp on steel and the ability to use it in the raw metal category came right with the space industry upgrade since there aren't any sustainable and fully scalable long term solutions for converting heat outside of the turbine (or just sheer geyser luck that lets you dump large amounts of water into space). The new space industry tech requires massive amounts of sustainable cooling. I'am not just talking about the hydrogen fuel plus oxydizer tank, but also about the hydrogen engine heat output which is ridiculously high. The steam turbine is the answer to that and also gives a more interesting and clean alternative to fixed heat temp for cooling industrial areas

I think you do not have any grasp on how much heat we are talking about.    It is not infinite.   Aquatuners do not 'make' heat.   They move it.  An aquatuner fed Steam Engine doesn't create power from nothing.   It creates it from heat, Just Like Any Other Steam Engine.   You lose some of that power in exchange for moving it to an apropriate location, but you shouldn't lose more power than you gain.

Because there are literally no sources of heat, anywhere in the game, that come anywhere close, to powering Even One Single Steam Engine with all the vents open.  Seriously.   None.   Nothing even approaches it.  Nothing is even in the same ballpark.   If you somehow manages to funnel all of the heat from all of your geysers on the entire map to one place, without using aquatuners, it MIGHT power 1, singular Steam Engine.   But probably not.   The magma on the map can last a little while, but will likely produce less energy total than the coal in your starting area.

Seriously, the steam engine is SO far from providing 'too much power' it is laughable.   There is no circumstance under which it will ever be an efficient way to power a base.   The energy is a trivial side product on what is essentially a suped up heat sink.  Unless the thing gets a MASSIVE overhaul that is all it could ever possibly be.

The exhaust on a rocket seems like a lot of heat, but it is actually quite a lot less than was created making the fuel. 

[psusi]

On 11/5/2018 at 8:39 PM, Nickerooni said:

1. Meaningful power generation from heat sources far outside normal dupe operation. Magma, volcanoes, rockets. Ideally, reducing them to temperatures that are manageable with Steel industry. It’s be nice to have a system that benefits from space materials, in some way

Then how are you supposed to deal with heat if you can't use the steam turbine to delete it?

On 11/5/2018 at 8:39 PM, Nickerooni said:

2. When paired with an aquatuner running supercoolant, it should do heat deletion with marginal net energy loss. This implies that it should provide half the heat deletion and require a meaningful energy cost if paired with an aquatuner circulating an inferior coolant. Giving you some nice feelings of progression 

If you do manage to find a way to deal with tons of heat, as you have to in order to get space materials, then by the time you can make supercoolant, you don't really need it anymore do you?  So it's a catch-22.

[clickrush]

27 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

Seriously, the steam engine is SO far from providing 'too much power' it is laughable

Not if you block the inputs. Then you get ridiculous amounts of power. You can easily reach thousands of kJ per day with just cooling your base and industrial area. If you start to convert all the heat from vents/geysers/volcanoes you'll be swimming in power. I already built several bases just this upgrade and tested different setups. And moved away from tile blocking steam turbines. It felt completely overpowered because it simply produces too much power per heat converted. And I only blocked 3 tiles in most of my builds.

This whole "you have no idea what you are talking about" attitude is completely uncalled for and reveals that you didn't actually test your assumptions. In one of my bases I have several cycle reports where my only power sources were the hydrogen generator and my steam turbines (as stated above) and still generated surplus power. Again, no volcanoes and no cooling stuff that doesn't need to be cooled.

Let met put it in a concise way what my point is because you seem to miss it entirely and try to argue about things I don't even talk about:

The power a vanilla steam turbine provides has to be significantly lower than an aquatuner uses if they are combined for it to be balanced. Also any change that lowers the required heat throughput will not shift the turbine away from beeing a cooler, but will just provide more and more power since you'd just use more of them than you are now. I'am not entirely sure if you understand this or agree/disagree with this statement.

There is absolutely no need for the game to provide more free power right now.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Iriswaters said:

I think you do not have any grasp on how much heat we are talking about.    It is not infinite.   Aquatuners do not 'make' heat.   They move it.  An aquatuner fed Steam Engine doesn't create power from nothing.   It creates it from heat, Just Like Any Other Steam Engine.   You lose some of that power in exchange for moving it to an apropriate location, but you shouldn't lose more power than you gain.

Use a liquid tepidizer.  Someone posted a bug report a few weeks ago where they did this: used a tepidizer to make heat to feed to the turbine to make power to power the tepidizer.  Positive feedback loop creating infinite power.

1 hour ago, Iriswaters said:

Seriously, the steam engine is SO far from providing 'too much power' it is laughable.   There is no circumstance under which it will ever be an efficient way to power a base.   The energy is a trivial side product on what is essentially a suped up heat sink.  Unless the thing gets a MASSIVE overhaul that is all it could ever possibly be.

+1

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

30 minutes ago, clickrush said:

Not if you block the inputs.

You know that will be fixed eventually, right? We can't keep hammering on things like "it provides a feasible advantage because we can use bugs". It's of course correct, but only for the time being.

It's good to discuss these things. There are glaring issues with the steam turbine. I think by now the buggy nature of the steam turbine is well known by the developers; we do nothing then complain about it, use it for our builds (which often show very creative builds, I do want to underline that), describe in detail what has to be done to use those bugs, etc. Imagine these bugs being taken out: what then? I can't imagine the steam turbine being looked at as "oh this will be a significant boost to my sustainable power supply". It will instead be looked as "this is just my mass cooling device".

For me there a few issues:

-Not enough diversity on liquid cooling. We kinda have good options on gass cooling (although more options are always better), but liquid cooling we only have one real option (if we follow the line of intention), being the aqua tuner. Going from intention, the steam turbine only should be cooling as a secondary function. Water sieve looks like intended cooling, but I feel it's more of a temporary solution for cooling to have workable bases before they introduced more feasible ways of cooling.

-The steam turbine needs to be reworked. Maybe it's too big for its bridges. Downsize it, make it produce less power and do way less cooling. Make it so you can use it to run off the heat from other geysers.

[clickrush]

2 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

You know that will be fixed eventually, right? We can't keep hammering on things like "it provides a feasible advantage because we can use bugs". It's of course correct, but only for the time being.

The point is that you can simulate right now how it would be if the turbine would produce more power per heat converted, which I'am against.

 

4 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Not enough diversity on liquid cooling. We kinda have good options on gass cooling (although more options are always better), but liquid cooling we only have one real option (if we follow the line of intention), being the aqua tuner. Going from intention, the steam turbine only should be cooling as a secondary function. Water sieve looks like intended cooling, but I feel it's more of a temporary solution for cooling to have workable bases before they introduced more feasible ways of cooling.

The aquatuner is not a cooling device. It is there to move heat or more specifically it increases the temperature range between two areas. It is used alongside a cooling mechanic or device that deletes (wheezeworts) or converts (turbine) heat. I know you know that, but lets be clear on what the actual options are for getting rid of heat. But I agree, why have more ways to provide industrial scale cooling such as fixed heat and the turbine.

 

7 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

-The steam turbine needs to be reworked. Maybe it's too big for its bridges. Downsize it, make it produce less power and do way less cooling. Make it so you can use it to run off the heat from other geysers.

Again, the only two tangible suggestions I saw so far are this one or provide more power per heat. I'am against both. By providing more power for heat you remove the nessecity for other power generators at some point, which can be proven with tile blocking. And your downsizing idea just makes it so you just build more turbines. Also the complete cooling system becomes incredibly cheap if you don't need to build a steel aquatuner alongside it and just let it run from typical geyser temp.

[crypticorb]

7 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

It's good to discuss these things. There are glaring issues with the steam turbine. I think by now the buggy nature of the steam turbine is well known by the developers; we do nothing then complain about it, use it for our builds (which often show very creative builds, I do want to underline that), describe in detail what has to be done to use those bugs, etc. Imagine these bugs being taken out: what then? I can't imagine the steam turbine being looked at as "oh this will be a significant boost to my sustainable power supply". It will instead be looked as "this is just my mass cooling device".

These discussions remind my very much of the good old Drip Cooling Borg Cube exploit, which used a simple bug to exploit massive heat deletion on a disturbing level and was incredibly easy to scale up. Everyone was up in arms when it was abused so widely, and jimmies were rustled again when it was removed. I sometimes wish I could play around with a LH2 setup with a borg cube.

If @Saturnus hadn't been at the forefront of exploit exploitation, it's unlikely these bugs would have been fixed as quickly as they did. The whole point of the forums is to discuss and share.

My personal opinion on the steam turbine as it currently stands is that it should:

1. Not be functional at all if inputs are blocked. This would force players to get creative to move enough steam and heat, but so be it.
2. Scale power to the number of blocked inputs. Solar panels already have this coding in place for reduced light, so why not turbines?
3. Scale power generated to the pressure/temperature differential between the top and bottom. Again requiring creativity, not cheesy exploits.

 

[psusi]

11 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Not be functional at all if inputs are blocked. This would force players to get creative to move enough steam and heat, but so be it.

That would make it unusable at all to generate power.  It would only be a very power hungry heat deletion engine.  And a giant pain in the ass to gather that much heat under it before allowing it to run and delete it all in seconds.

13 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Scale power to the number of blocked inputs. Solar panels already have this coding in place for reduced light, so why not turbines?

Pretty much the same thing, only less of a pain in the ass.

13 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Scale power generated to the pressure/temperature differential between the top and bottom. Again requiring creativity, not cheesy exploits.

I'm not sure how much creativity it takes to set up a door compressor and fill the room with a metric ton of steam to get a crazy pressure differential.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

15 minutes ago, clickrush said:

The aquatuner is not a cooling device. It is there to move heat or more specifically it increases the temperature range between two areas. It is used alongside a cooling mechanic or device that deletes (wheezeworts) or converts (turbine) heat. I know you know that, but lets be clear on what the actual options are for getting rid of heat. But I agree, why have more ways to provide industrial scale cooling such as fixed heat and the turbine.

 

No it's a cooling device. I make a distinct difference between a cooling device and a heat deletion device. All heat deletion devices are cooling devices, but the reverse is not always true.

17 minutes ago, clickrush said:

Again, the only two tangible suggestions I saw so far are this one or provide more power per heat. I'am against both. By providing more power for heat you remove the nessecity for other power generators at some point, which can be proven with tile blocking. And your downsizing idea just makes it so you just build more turbines. Also the complete cooling system becomes incredibly cheap if you don't need to build a steel aquatuner alongside it and just let it run from typical geyser temp.

That's why you should downsize it. There's nothing wrong with the concept of converting heat to power, but the scale it is done is probably too large. Make it produce miniscule amounts of power, like 60W. Then downsize the heat requirements and cooling to acceptable levels and keep the requirement for steam.

An other suggestion would be to only be able to build it on geysers. That way you limit the scaling of it. After that, adjust cooling, heat requirement and power parameters accordingly. You have a 500°C hydrogen geyser? You get a lot of power from it. A liquid CO2 geyser? Useless. A chlorine geyser? You get a decent power boost.

[Saturnus]

Wouldn't a heat exchanger be more accurate than cooling device?

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

21 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

• Not be functional at all if inputs are blocked. This would force players to get creative to move enough steam and heat, but so be it.
• Scale power to the number of blocked inputs. Solar panels already have this coding in place for reduced light, so why not turbines?
• Scale power generated to the pressure/temperature differential between the top and bottom. Again requiring creativity, not cheesy exploits.

Very nice suggestions. I very much think more game mechanics should be developed around atmosphere pressure.

Just now, Saturnus said:

Wouldn't a heat exchanger be more accurate than cooling device?

Technically the fridge containing your cooled foods is a heat exchanger. 

[Saturnus]

12 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Technically the fridge containing your cooled foods is a heat exchanger. 

Exactly. So if you call them heat exchanging devices and heat deleting devices it much more accurately describes the function of each device and avoids confusion.

Oddly enough the fridge in this game is a heat deleting device. It cools down the food inside to 4C but the fridge has a fixed heat output.

[psusi]

25 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

That's why you should downsize it. There's nothing wrong with the concept of converting heat to power, but the scale it is done is probably too large. Make it produce miniscule amounts of power, like 60W. Then downsize the heat requirements and cooling to acceptable levels and keep the requirement for steam.

You completely ignored the quote you were responding to and imply repeated what you said before.  Shrinking it down doesn't change anything except for the fact that you have to build more of them.

27 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

An other suggestion would be to only be able to build it on geysers. That way you limit the scaling of it. After that, adjust cooling, heat requirement and power parameters accordingly. You have a 500°C hydrogen geyser? You get a lot of power from it. A liquid CO2 geyser? Useless. A chlorine geyser? You get a decent power boost.

Not a bad idea for making the turbine actually be a power generator, but we would need to get something else to replace the heat deletion role the turbine now plays.

21 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Wouldn't a heat exchanger be more accurate than cooling device?

No; a heat exchanger just passively lets entropy do its thing, moving heat from high temp to low.  A cooler uses energy to move heat the other direction.

[Saturnus]

10 minutes ago, psusi said:

No; a heat exchanger just passively lets entropy do its thing, moving heat from high temp to low.  A cooler uses energy to move heat the other direction.

No. Heat exchangers can be both active and passive. My apartment is both cooled and heated by an active heat exchanger HVAC unit.

 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

57 minutes ago, psusi said:

You completely ignored the quote you were responding to and imply repeated what you said before.  Shrinking it down doesn't change anything except for the fact that you have to build more of them.

1 hour ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Keeping the requirement of steam makes if you want to spam it all over the place quite a pain in the ass. I do agree there should be more limitations in place.

59 minutes ago, psusi said:

Not a bad idea for making the turbine actually be a power generator, but we would need to get something else to replace the heat deletion role the turbine now plays.

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

Which I agree. To be fair, I think we are all capable of getting rid of excessive heat with or without a steam turbine. I see a lot more of an issue with people relative new to the game, and also the lack of any decent options that make sense. The aqua tuner is a good option, but only moves heat from one place to the other. The game developers probably envisioned us putting heat into gas and liquids and then dump it into space, but they underestimated we actually waste little resources.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

No. Heat exchangers can be both active and passive. My apartment is both cooled and heated by an active heat exchanger HVAC unit.

Two different things.  The HVAC is active, and if a heat exchanger is then used downstream, that part is passive.  Same thing as using an aquatuner in a closed loop to cool a water tank that you then use to cool other liquids or gasses flowing through the same water tank.  The tank is a heat exchanger, the aquatuner is the cooler.

39 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Keeping the requirement of steam makes if you want to spam it all over the place quite a pain in the ass. I do agree there should be more limitations in place.

Yes, that is our point; simply making them smaller just means you spam several of them.  No real change there.  Limiting where they can be placed is something else entirely.

40 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Which I agree. To be fair, I think we are all capable of getting rid of excessive heat with or without a steam turbine.

No; the only reason I built a turbine is because I needed a better way to get rid of heat than the toilet loop and AETN.

[Iriswaters]

3 hours ago, psusi said:

Use a liquid tepidizer.  Someone posted a bug report a few weeks ago where they did this: used a tepidizer to make heat to feed to the turbine to make power to power the tepidizer.  Positive feedback loop creating infinite power.

+1

No, not even close.  Tepidizer heats at a fixed rate of 4179 DTU/s.  With 4 vents closed, a steam engine cools at a rate of:

2000*75*4.179=626,850

You need to run 150 tepidizers.  Alternatively, 75 coal generators will do.

The idea you can get hundreds of kW easily is ridiculous.  The amount of heat 5 vents needs is really out of scope.  6M DTU/s is enough to produce 80kg of LOH/s.  Enough to cool every geyser and volcano on a map to ice, many times over.  The only thing that really has that much heat is the magma core, since that can only cool 40kg of magma/s.  Or 24 ton/cycle.  That will last you a couple hundred cycles, at 2kW before it burns out.

4 hours ago, clickrush said:

Not if you block the inputs. Then you get ridiculous amounts of power. You can easily reach thousands of kJ per day with just cooling your base and industrial area. If you start to convert all the heat from vents/geysers/volcanoes you'll be swimming in power. I already built several bases just this upgrade and tested different setups. And moved away from tile blocking steam turbines. It felt completely overpowered because it simply produces too much power per heat converted. And I only blocked 3 tiles in most of my builds.

This whole "you have no idea what you are talking about" attitude is completely uncalled for and reveals that you didn't actually test your assumptions. In one of my bases I have several cycle reports where my only power sources were the hydrogen generator and my steam turbines (as stated above) and still generated surplus power. Again, no volcanoes and no cooling stuff that doesn't need to be cooled.

Let met put it in a concise way what my point is because you seem to miss it entirely and try to argue about things I don't even talk about:

The power a vanilla steam turbine provides has to be significantly lower than an aquatuner uses if they are combined for it to be balanced. Also any change that lowers the required heat throughput will not shift the turbine away from beeing a cooler, but will just provide more and more power since you'd just use more of them than you are now. I'am not entirely sure if you understand this or agree/disagree with this statement.

There is absolutely no need for the game to provide more free power right now.

Your industrial area produces tens of millions of DTU/s?  I find that claim dubious.   Check that, I am just going to come out and call you a liar.

[psusi]

32 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

No, not even close.  Tepidizer heats at a fixed rate of 4179 DTU/s.  With 4 vents closed, a steam engine cools at a rate of:

2000*75*4.179=626,850

You need to run 150 tepidizers.  Alternatively, 75 coal generators will do.

This says otherwise:

 

34 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

Your industrial area produces tens of millions of DTU/s?  I find that claim dubious.   Check that, I am just going to come out and call you a liar.

I'm thinking there is something wrong with your math, like that 2000g figure should only be 2kg.  If it deleted as much heat as you claim, I would not be able to run one for a minute simply by refining a batch of steel.

 

[Iriswaters]

One vent is 2kg/s.  That's 2000g.  2000g of steam, cooled 75°, with an SHC of 4.179 is 626,000.  That's the math.  There's a reason that you need supercooler based aquatuners to keep up.

Refining one batch of steel isn't going to power a steam engine, as metal refineries only produce 16kDTU/s.

[crypticorb]

36 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

No, not even close.  Tepidizer heats at a fixed rate of 4179 DTU/s.  With 4 vents closed, a steam engine cools at a rate of:

2000*75*4.179=626,850

You need to run 150 tepidizers.  Alternatively, 75 coal generators will do.

You're mistaken on this point, the tepidizer exploit allows a pulsing automation to force a tepidizer over its maximum 75C limit, and even heat steam directly since the tepidizer doesn't make the temperature or liquid immersion checks until about a second after it starts up.

The tepidizer outputs 4064,000 DTU/s, not 4179 DTU/s. That number might be based on the material it is immersed in, but it's still far higher than you assumed.

Since the tepidizer only takes 960W to run, and can easily keep a turbine heated, so long as you can move steam fast enough to keep it pressurized you will guaranteed have an infinite positive power loop, up until the thing melts itself.

[Iriswaters]

The tepidizer thing is a hack that plays with the way gases work.  Out blocks off the steam exiting so the engine always thinks it has a vacuum above it.  

 

 

And ok, yes, if you block vents and use an obvious exploit in the tepidizer -and- use door pumps, it is possible to get infinite power.  Congrats I guess?

[crypticorb]

58 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

Your industrial area produces tens of millions of DTU/s?  I find that claim dubious.   Check that, I am just going to come out and call you a liar.

Let's let this starting train of negativity end here, alright? If you want to call someone mistaken based on evidence, fine, but calling people a liar based on what you don't know for certain is a waste of everyone's time.

LOX and LH2 production facilities can easily produce millions of DTU/s, using aquatuners and supercoolant. There might also be some other purpose @clickrush is working towards that requires insane amounts of cooling that neither of us have even considered.

[psusi]

19 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

One vent is 2kg/s.  That's 2000g.  2000g of steam, cooled 75°, with an SHC of 4.179 is 626,000.  That's the math.  There's a reason that you need supercooler based aquatuners to keep up.

Refining one batch of steel isn't going to power a steam engine, as metal refineries only produce 16kDTU/s.

I'm not talking about running it continuously.  Once or twice a cycle I refine one batch of steel and it seems to run the turbine for about a minute.  That's a 20% duty cycle.  The way you are talking it sounds like I should have to refine 50 tonnes of steel to do that.  Given that I can manage a 20% duty cycle with one refinery, that should mean it's generating about 1/5th as much heat as the turbine consumes.