The big two-stroke Diesel engines, like those used on ships, have energy efficiencies over 50%, e.g. around 55%.
I do not know if there have been some recent improvements in gas turbines, but at least a few years ago the efficiency of gas turbines was lower, sometimes as low as 40%. The reason is that the exhaust gases of a gas turbine are very hot, retaining inside a significant fraction of energy from the consumed fuel.
Electrical turbogenerators are preferred for mobile or military applications due to much smaller sizes for a given power and higher reliability, not because of good efficiency.
In order to have good efficiency when using a gas turbine, one must recover the heat from the exhaust gases, like in all combined-cycle power plants, where high efficiencies, e.g. over 65%, are attained by using a cascade of steam turbines, typically 3 steam turbines, for heat recovery. This increases a lot the size of the power plant and it requires a lot of water, which in Antarctica could be obtained only by melting ice, reducing the efficiency gains and complicating a lot the power plant (a special construction would be necessary to prevent water freezing in undesirable places and to use the water in closed cycle, otherwise the energy efficiency of a combined cycle starting from ice may be less than of a simple gas turbine).
A more realistic solution for using a gas turbine in Antarctica would be to recover the heat from the gas turbine that burns fuel with a closed-cycle gas turbine using supercritical carbon dioxide. While this is a promising method for replacing the entire cascade of steam turbines (with steam turbines, you need a cascade because heat is exchanged at fixed temperatures, where water is boiling; while with a supercritical fluid heat can be exchanged at a continuously decreasing temperature of the exhaust gases, recovering most of the waste heat in a single heat exchanger), it was mostly experimental and I do not know if there are any suitable commercial products at this time.
Every week I hook up to a military vehicle (HEMTTA4) that was built in 1984, with a CAT diesel engine. Absolutely flawless.
Besides, a turbine engine has two modes: ridiculous and ludicrous. I can idle a diesel engine for days on the fuel it takes to fire up and run a turbine engine for a short period.
If you really wanted, I suppose, you could get a liquid fuel turbine, but it would be military or aviation, and much rarer than what they have. And they need to have things as simple as possible, given their staffing constraints.
Also, they seem to like several smaller gensets, to allow for problems and maintenance, which leads to relatively small generators. (They're 750kW ea.) Turbines aren't really common that small. They mostly want to start at several MW.
Among critical factors, diesel fuel freezes at far higher temperatures than kerosene, which is important for both aircraft (which typically fly in ambient temperatures about -40 °F/°C) and polar operations. Blends such as Jet A1 and Jet B (kerosene + petrol) have still lower freezing points of -47 °C and -60 °C respectively.
Diesel's freezing temperatures are ~ - 8--9 °C / 15--17 °F. Kerosene and jet aviation fuel are rated to -40 °C / -40 °F (both temperature scales are the same at this temperature).
Piston aircraft burn petrol / gasoline with a freezing point of ~ -73 °C / -100 °F.
Shorter hydrocarbon chain lengths -> lower freezing temperatures. Methane (CH4) is liquid to -182 °C / -195 °F, and only liquifies at -162 °C / -259 °F.
Important given that the site has no access in or out for roughly 8 months out of the year.
It's not nearly as bad now due to improvements in electronics, nuke tech, and automation, but turns out running a nuclear reactor takes a lot of highly skilled (and expensive) people. Of course nukey-poo was staffed by like 30 seabees working full time so staffing was a bit less of an issue but that's still a very expensive proposition.
There's talk from the biden admin of the military adopting SMRs (small modular reactors) again now that they are so much cheaper, simpler, better contained, and less staff intensive to operate. So it'd be interesting to see if they offer support for one to the USAP to use at the pole.
Of course that comes with it's own added problems (potential interference with science experiments like icecube) given that they spew neutrinos with basically no ability to shield them. So if they were to do it, they'd probably have to install it quite a ways away from the dark sector.
I wouldn’t say I even come close to being and arm chair expert on this, I’m just curious if anyone else knows.
Nothing beats being able to make field repairs quickly and easily when crap hits the fan.
Abrams use a turbine for the weight to power output ratio, optimizing mobility rather than efficiency.
Without enough personal experience to compare, though, I can't say that I'd be surprised either way.
They would use electricity from the grid, why bother generating power specifically for the base? Outsource the capital and maintenance costs to a utility.
Some land-grant universities generate their own power and some industrial sites have their own dedicated hydropower, but a military base would just use the grid.
For critical/backup power needs at the base itself, a combination of UPSes and diesel generators, just like any other commercial or industrial facility. Diesel gensets are an extremely mature, well understood technology that are very reliable and cheap to maintain.