Heat transfer and energy delivery is part of the series after I’m done with theoretical power production. There is definitely a lot of hype about it.
Since the creation of the first coal-steam power plant there hasn’t been all that much innovation on the electrical generation side
No, there hasn't. The industry is too powerful :)
Imagine that the electric cars survived the internal combustion engines powered vehicles onslaught early in the history of autonomous locomotion? Where would we be now?
I think it was the Electric Car company in the early 1900s that had their warehouse of electric taxis burned to the ground. No more electric cars appeared en mass until Ford did their prototype.
I am not familiar with the background yet it is said that the fire wasn't a coincidence. Things like these make me wonder in what direction could humanity be advancing if things turned differently at some crossroads ... Like the oil industry, for example
There are documentaries on the net of other projects supposedly deep-sixed by Big Oil. One project was a gas vapor engine. It was supposedly able to get a car to travel 1000-2000 mile on two gallons of gas. The tech was real but I don’t know if what happened to those people were real.