The way they work is by having a bimetallic junction where a temperature difference between that junction and the other side of the wire pair is connected cause

The way they work is by having a bimetallic junction where a temperature difference between that junction and the other side of the wire pair is connected causes a voltage difference. If you were able to prevent heat from going from the hot side to the cold side through the electrical wiring, yeah, I think the efficiency would go up. I worked on a battery project once where the internals were over 400C, and we needed like 000 gauge wiring which in copper meant our major thermal losses were through our conductors. But the article is badly written and has a bad title. The actual article is here: https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/01/26/electricity-not-heat-flows-in-vanadium-dioxide/ https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/01/26/electricity-not-heat-f... and indeed they specifically mention applications to thermoelectrics. The big takeaway was the 10x lower thermal conductivity than expected for the given electrical conductivity. Kind of embarrassing that the linked article on sciencealert just copy-pastes random portions into a new article and doesn't even bother with the credits at the bottom.