<story><title>Thermoelectric heating stands at the brink of commercialization</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/thermoelectric-heating</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gcanyon</author><text>&amp;gt; Researchers use a dimensionless quantity called ZT to describe the strength of the thermoelectric effect in any combination of materials. Two decades ago, combinations such as lead and tellurium yielded ZT values of around 1. After ten years, the search for new, more complex, and more effective materials had yielded ZT values of 2.&lt;p&gt;These sentences are useless. Going from 1 to 2 &lt;i&gt;probably&lt;/i&gt; means doubling the efficiency, &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; the base value is 0. But even if that&amp;#x27;s true (which it&amp;#x27;s not guaranteed to be) is a real-world usable value 3? or 478?&lt;p&gt;Much later in the article: &amp;quot;Vining predicted in 2009 that a ZT of 4 would be the required threshold for commercialization.&amp;quot; There it is. But even with that, the information given tells us very little about the underlying property, or the technology.</text></comment>
<story><title>Thermoelectric heating stands at the brink of commercialization</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/thermoelectric-heating</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elil17</author><text>As someone who works in this industry - no, thermoelectric heating does not stand at the brink of commercialization. The fundamental issue with thermoelectric heating is that you need a material with high electrical conductivity but very low thermal conductivity. zT is a metric that measures this ratio. Conducting electricity but not heat is a weird property for a material to have and no one even knows if zT can be raised much from where it is today. Even if it could, it would probably be expensive, so you&amp;#x27;d probably want to use thermoelectric cooling for things like on-chip computer cooling, not to cool your whole house.</text></comment>