Hooooooooooooooooooot

Water and steam just too goddamn convenient. Super high latent heat so it can move a ton of energy with a quick phase change, works at reasonable pressures and temperatures, stays liquid all the time when you want it to so pumps work, and it's so readily available as to be damn near free. Super cool!
- also almost non-corrosive, non-toxic, doesn't damage ozone layer, zero global warming potential, non-flammable etc (lots of organic rankine cycle fluids fail one or more of these. tradeoff is utilization of lower temperature sources)
  
  zero global warming potential
  This one isn't right. Nobody will complain about you releasing it, but it's a quite strong global warming gas.
- It’s great for nuclear reactors. Hot rock make turbine go brrr
  
  Best explanation of nuclear energy I’ve ever heard
  
  Nuclear energy is solar too

Solar photovoltaic is the only one i can think of that isn't just a fancy way to make steam
EDIT
ok let's clarify to say a method that isn't related to movement of a fluid that spins a turbine. So not windmills (air is a fluid), not hydro, not geothermal, etc.
- Piezoelectricity is the only other I can really think of. But it's not like we are out here smacking crystals with hammers to make power.
  
  Why not, though?
  On a serious note: that's exactly what we're doing with lighters. At least some of them use piezo elements and not the sparkly wheel thingy to ignite the gas. And it's real fun to zap yourself with it.
  
  Wait a minute, what IF
  
  Give buskers the acoustic guitar with a link to the grid and every time they play they’ll generate a ton of electricity (in relative terms…)
  Electro-Acoustic guitars use piezos to pick up the audio if you didn’t know
  
  Even if we used piezo, the movement of the hammer would still have to come from some power source, which would still be the same sources like moving steam, water, or wind.
  
  piezoelectricity is just simple electric motor
- All power generation is either solar or 'make thing spin', unless we're including RTGs and Piezoelectrics.
  
  But not all electricity generation is based on boiling water. Wind, hydro and tidal don't need to generate large amounts of heat to make steam that spins a turbine, they just use natural movement to do so.
  
  All of these are in some way heat engines
  
  Peltier Effect?
  
  Solar thermal power…
- What about Wind Mills?
  
  Wind is just dry steam
- Hydro power uses running water not hot water.
  Squeezing can be converter to electricity with pizeo electric. Heat difference can be converted into electric directly with peltier devices. Both of these are very inefficient ways to make electricy.
  
  I'm the spirit of this comment, water is just cold steam.
- there are also fuel cells
- I guess aeolic energy also doesn't use steam (unless we count the air humidity), but still involves turning a turbine.
  
  Excuse my blatant ignorance, but what is aeolic energy? I've never heard about it before.
- The peltier effect can be used to generate electricity from a thermal gradient. It's not very efficient, though. There's a reason mechanical means of electrical production predominate.
- Aerokinetics/hydrokinetics as well. With steam, we're creating the source fluid that turns the turbines to make electricity. Those source fluids can also exist as wind/tides/rivers naturally.

That's why Photovoltaic Cells got the Nobel Prize, imo. The only new way to generate electricity actually put to use AFAIK.
Of course it's completely inefficient at large scale and they just revert back to mirroring light into a collection tower where steam happens.
- Wasn't the main appeal of the mirror installations that you can store the heat somewhat efficiently? Rooftop solar is cost effective even here in Germany, where darkness and shadows loom around every corner.
  
  The nonchalant poetry of your reply made me look up and appreciate your username.
  
  These numbers change every year, but: solar panels on roofs don't track so they'd be lucky to get 20%, average closer to 12%, efficiency and slowly degrade over a few years. Sun tracking panels can reach a maximum of around 40%, theoretically, but on average more like 20%-30%. You have to subtract the negative impact of creating and assembling the materials from it's lifetime effectiveness, in Germany I believe Hydrogen Steel exists which is much greener than other types of smelting, or otherwise Aluminum is the higher grade material used for such things, and Photovoltaic Panels have a very specialized Glass in most cases that has to be exceptionally clear and strong. If the capacitance of the system is not enough to hold the produced power then an electrical failure will occur, so you must also include large commercial and industrial batteries.
  Meanwhile, a Heliostat (a Collection Tower and Mirror Array) out in the desert has a theoretical efficiency just below 70%. Furthermore, if the capacity of the grid fills up then the array can be disable by adjusting the mirrors and excess power can be stored for extremely long periods of time by utilizing molten salt beneath the tower.
  These efficiency numbers refer to how much of the heat energy from full spectrum light hitting the array is converted into electricity. Home panels are nice because you can put them on your home
  
  it's both, but i'm not sure if these large solar concentrators (ivanpah or these things in spain) are more efficient than current pv panels
- There’s also wind. But that just skips the steam
  
  There is an argument to be made that the wind power is technically steam power, given the moist gaseous fluid turning a turbine, but that's silly.
  
  Buy it's all better than the old smoky steam we used to use
- Cost per MWh is what tends to matter more than efficiency. Photovoltaics have become dirt cheap. Mirror collection systems haven't been able to keep up, and the projects for them are basically defunct at this point.
  Was worth trying, though. It wasn't obvious that photovoltaics would get so damn cheap 10 or 20 years ago.
- great for satellites tho
- Is it that they're inefficient or harder to maintain?
  
  Yes. Heliostat's max efficiency estimates are like 70%, sun tracking panels 40%, static panels 20%.

"I found a new source of naturally occurring waste heat"

- Yep. Angry rock make water go hiss.

Some types of fusion can bypass steam generation and use what's creatively called Direct Energy Conversion. If the fusion products are charged particles they can be passed through a magnetic field to separate them based on charge and collected onto plates. When you look at the electric potential between the plates you've effectively created a voltage, no steam necessary. It's also theoretically possible to do the same with some types of fission products too.
- I thought they take advantage of the velocity of the charged ions to magnetically transfer power to electromagnetic coils around the reactor.
  
  There's a whole bunch of mechanisms, largely depending on the fusion architecture and the atoms being fused. For tokamak reactors the circular nature lends itself well to what you describe, though usually it's energy being imparted into the ions to keep them contained and away from the walls. In the 'standard' deuterium-tritium fusion model (the easiest to perform) fusion produces a helium nucleus and a neutron, where the neutron gets most of the energy. Since a neutron can't be contained by magnets it impacts the chamber walls. This heat is wicked away by, you guessed it, cooling water which turns into steam. In order to use a direct energy conversion strategy you need a fusion reaction that produces no neutrons, but we're not there yet.

generate energy.
not generate electricity.
- generate electricity.
  not generate electricity.
  generate electricity the other way around.
  not generate electricity.
  generate electricity.
  not generate electricity.
  generate electricity the other way around.
  not generate electricity...
  Edit: I dumbly misread your post (energy/electricity) & thought of this, which I will leave here because it made me smile & that's a good thing.

/uj Steam is just an intermediary form for almost all these tho (except maybe geothermal? not sure), not the real source.
- Steam just makes sense as a fluid for heat engines, thermal power plants are mostly steam, except when gas turbines are involved, but even then there's most of the time steam bottoming cycle. (gas turbine burns something, then exhaust is hot enough to power steam cycle) Unless thermal power plant is small, then it's more likely to be diesel engine (up to few MW). Only when it's photovoltaics, or hydropower, or wind farm (or tidal powerplant, or some other weird ones) there's no place for steam to be involved (solar thermal plants sometimes use steam cycle). Geothermal powerplants use steam if source is hot enough, otherwise it's something more volatile in organic Rankine cycle
  
  Hydroelectric is just liquid steam, and wind is just cold, thin steam.
  
  I'm referring to the root energy source, rather than how it's transferred.
- Geothermal power still uses steam to generate electricity. It's steams all the way down.
  
  Steam isn't the energy source tho, just a transfer mechanism.
- Solar is an exception I think
  
  True, but there are also solar steam systems, using a parabolic mirror to focus the sun on a steam drum.
  
  Solar, wind, and hydro don't use steam. (Well, hydro can bypass the steam part. It depends)
- and diodes

It always produces unbelievably great memes when another person discovers how humanity generates energy from splitting atoms. I was baffled, too.
- It just makes sense. Our only way to convert electromagnetic radiation to current is photovoltaics, so solar. No way to convert alpha/beta radiation to current. So what else does fission release? Fuckload of motion. Mostly heat if it’s not as a blast, in which case it’s still mostly heat but with a pressure wave that levels cities. Heat though, heat were real good at making into electricity.

I like piezoelectrics and kinetic generators. The only two methods of generating electricity I know of that don't involve steam other than solar panels.
At least, I think they're different... Is a standard copper wire+magnet generator pizeoelectric? Or is it simply the operation is similar in that you generate electricity from moving things together? Like the difference between tiny little things in your shirt that generate electricity as you move around vs those flash lights you shake to charge.
- Piezoelectric effect is when you vibrate certain crystals and they give off electricity. It's also reversible. You can feed them electricity to generate sound. The beep-boop sound from small electronic devices is usually from a piezo speaker, because they're dirt cheap.
  You don't get significant amounts of power out of it, though.
  
  Yeah it’s quartz lol
  Also photovoltaic is reversible as well! Put light in get current out, put current in, get light out. But the diodes that get good light for the currents we use are shit for generating the current we like from the light we have and vice versa. Also! Most diodes are these types! That’s why we make their casing black, otherwise the light will interfere with computation!
  
  Yeah. The one thing I ever saw that has me excited for a product that could exist, is that they can power a simple OLED display. And since an OLED display can be paper thin, they could put one in a t-shirt and you could have an animated design on your shirt instead of just a static picture. And that would be dope.
  Of course, you'd need more than just the display, and i don't think the little generators that can be sewn into a shirt would be enough to power the computing device that would be necessary to drive the animation for the display.
- They’re different. The piezoelectric effect converts pressure to charge. However steam is just kinetic with an extra step