[zdragnar]

You could use it for district heating of buildings in winter, but that's about it.

As the article mentions, you need to get above the phase transition between liquid and gas at high pressure (they mention 150c) to be able to reliably and quickly convert the thermal energy into kinetic, then into electrical inductance (gas expansion moving a turbine, moving a dynamo).

Maybe if you went into business making pot roast, you could cook meat low and slow, or set up massive dehydrators.

Running it under a shallow drying bed might make salt extraction from water evaporation faster, too.

Sadly, none of those things tend to be very close to mines.

[angiosperm]

There are fluids other than water that have usefully different boiling points.

Problem is that mature turbines are designed for steam. Turbines for other fluids cannot approach their market volume.

[pi-e-sigma]

That's not true at all. If any other liquids were more useful they would have been used long time ago, even in places where the cost is not of primary concern, such as nuclear submarines.

[angiosperm]

Nuclear submarines have no use for a working fluid that boils below 100 C. Indeed, they pressurize the water so that the boiling point is well above that point, because they have no difficulty heating water well above that.

Steam is used everywhere despite that it is quite corrosive, mainly because it is cheap.

[pi-e-sigma]

You clearly don't know what you are talking about. Water steam is a perfect medium for turbines because of its favorable thermodynamic properties, mainly high specific heat allowing water steam to absorb large amount of thermal energy. Also water steam is not corrosive because water itself is not corrosive. It's the dissolved minerals making it corrosive and that's why water used for turbines is purified first.

[angiosperm]

Yet, steam turbines attached to nuke and coal plants spend 10-20% of their time offline, being overhauled mainly because of high-temperature/high-pressure steam's corrosiveness.

Cold distilled water is not corrosive. Superheated steam, howsoever pure, little resembles cold liquid water in any detail. Furthermore, hot water will pick up minerals from whatever it runs through.

Many materials that are not especially corrosive as cold liquids behave quite differently at extreme pressure and temperature. Water has uncommon valuable thermodynamic properties, but not uniquely so; its chief virtue is that it is good enough and cheap.

[pi-e-sigma]

OK, give me an example of one such liquid from your list of 'many' that has all the desired properties of water and doesn't have any undesired, such as being a poison. You can't because there aren't any.

[mr_toad]

> That's not true at all. If any other liquids were more useful they would have been used long time ago,

Gas turbines are common when power to weight is more important than cost.