Are you asking if it violates the 2nd law? Of course not. It's just a heat engine like any other electrical generator so it's not going to have fundamentally n

Are you asking if it violates the 2nd law? Of course not. It's just a heat engine like any other electrical generator so it's not going to have fundamentally new kinds of applications. Don't forget you can also use the waste heat from a device (like a computer) to run a mechanical heat engine to generate power to help run the device. But only partially. I guess we don't do that much because it's probably not economically feasible. That's kind of what turbochargers in cars do though.