 Here in this diagram, we are looking at how a basic power plant works. A power plant generates electricity, and it burns a fuel and converts first the chemical energy that is there in the fuel here to heat energy. And that heat energy or thermal energy is converted to mechanical energy over here, and mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy in this generator. So basically, a power plant is divided into three components. The first component is boiler here, which burns the fuel, coal, oil, natural gas, or any fuel, and produces the heat. The water that is going into this boiler boils and becomes the steam. This steam at high pressures and temperatures has a lot of energy, kinetic energy. And this energy basically comes into this turbine and turns this turbine wheels. And we use this high pressure steam to do that. And this high pressure steam gives up the energy here and then turns into low pressure, low temperature steam. And this when turns, this turbine when turns, this turbine is hooked up to a generator. This generator is nothing but a magnetic field. In other words, that magnetic field is created by these poles north and south, and these yellow ones are basically the magnets. And between these two poles, this electrical conductor, a copper wire, which is turned many rounds across or around the armature, turns. The two ends of this wire are hooked up to a load or to transmission line. So when this conductor is turned in a magnetic field, you get the electricity. To turn this conductor, we are using this turbine, because both of these are hooked together. Once this moves, this moves and generates the electricity. To move this turbine, we need high pressure steam. To produce this high pressure steam, we need thermal energy or a fuel called or oil or natural gas. And that's how these conversions are taking place. Now let's get to this turbine. This turbine, the high pressure steam, after turning this turbine, converts into low pressure, low temperature steam. That steam is sent to a condenser. A condenser is, this is the condenser which has cold water on the outside. When the steam is going through this cold water, this steam turns into water or condensers. That is the reason we call this condenser. And this low pressure steam that is condensed into water is put back into the boiler, which again turns into steam. And obviously when we convert or when we turn this steam into water, that energy is coming into this cooling water. And this water turns into warm water. And this warm water is again sent all the way up to this cooling tower. The purpose of this cooling tower is to cool the water that is condensing this steam. So this is simply like a shower head. Almost hundreds and thousands of shower heads at the top of an almost 10-story tall building. And when these droplets fall down, what happens is the air that is going across this or around these small droplets picks up the energy from these droplets and hot air goes out and cold water comes down. Basically, almost about 30%, 40% of the energy that we put into this device is actually dumped out into the environment, into the atmosphere through this condenser or cooling tower. That is the reason this turbine part is notoriously inefficient, and boiler part is pretty good actually. It's about 90% efficient. This is about 40% efficient. But once we turn this thermal energy into mechanical energy, conversion into electrical energy is pretty efficient, which is about roughly this generator efficiency is almost 95% efficient. And as I said, this turbine is only about 40% efficient. And this boiler is roughly about 89% to 90% efficient. So of all the three components, this is the lowest efficient or least efficient component. And this is the most efficient component with 95% efficiency. That's how a simple power plant works. One other point that I want to make is when we burn this fuel, of course, this thermal energy is going out here. That is one type of pollution. And when we burn these fuels here, the gases that are produced here are emitted through the stack. And this is where the chemical pollution or the pollutants are emitted into the atmosphere. This is of concern for all of us in a power plant.