Add supercapacitors to make power management easier and more efficient.

Question

Power usage seems pretty inconsistent and it only takes a single spike ever so slightly above the capacity of the grid to shutdown a whole factory, which is very frustrating to deal with and is quite inefficient as you need to build so much extra power just to deal with the occasional spike.
A nice gameplay solution for this could be to introduce supercapacitors that can be built and attached to a power grid to smooth out usage, it'll use your nice graph to figure out the average usage over the last X seconds and when usage is below that average the supercapacitor uses the delta to store power and when it is over the average it will discharge the power delta. This should help keep power usage much more steady, efficient and easy to manage.
If the grid does go down though the supercapacitors would need to be fully charged before the rest of the factory starts drawing power because you likely wouldn't have an average value to use for a little while and would have to draw power from the supercapacitors to avoid a spike taking down the grid again before the factory can return to a more steady state.

Answer 1

Or just make battery units that consume power to a certain point, can be overclockable to store more backup power and can automatically disperse to the grid when a spike is reached. Will have a certain countdown timer to indicate energy drain, giving you enough time to build more power units to increase capacity. (Like 2-3 min timer before the batteries lose energy). Each battery could have a certain capacity to store power, and would draw x amount of MW each tick until reserves are full. There should be a limit as to how many batteries you could construct, however.

Comments

Yeah that'd be another way it could work, though I don't think there would be a need to limit the number you could construct because at some point they would naturally just stop being useful.

Answer 2

So you could make two Power circuit each for half of your machines or make a second power circuit for your machines that gets overpowerd.

The machines worke constantly for that what i saw, only spikes you have are overpower and go beyond your power limit or build more machines as your power circuit can handle.

I will build my factory with more than one power circuit and put some machines on my main power and some machines that i later overpower on the second circuit.

Later with higher Tier we get atomic power and i think than we dont need to watch the power limit instead we have to watch the out the plant itself to not melt it down. (i hope)

Comments

Once you get to the point where you cannot supply buildings fast enough (you can only build so many minors) it becomes wasteful having to build more power production to cover the occasional time that you need full power when the power only occasionally hits that peak.
And having multiple grids makes it really difficult to maximise power usage too as often the logical grouping of producers doesn't add up perfectly to the max power production, so you have to build far more power plants than is necessary to maintain everything, and if you are doing that anyway there is no need for them to be on separate grids in the first place. You also run into issues when having to add all the extra conveyors that have to weave in and out of your factory to supply the power plants of each grid. It is FAR easier to manage one grid with one area dedication to a scaleable power supply solution than constantly pulling apart large sections of your factory because you are suddenly short 2mw and have to add more buildings into a space that cannot accommodate them.

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At this Q&A Board there is a thread with math about how many Coal Plants you can feed with one coal mine. I think if we go into later Tiers and get to the point building atomic plants we will have enaugh power for a very big factory.

If you look at the Wiki you will see the increase

Biomass Burner = 20 MW
Coal Generator = 40 MW
Fuel Generator = 150 MW
Termal Plant = 200 MW
Nuklear Power Plant = up to 1000 MW

So if you go into higher Tiers you will need less Power Plant or even if you replace them you will get more MW output. I dont think in lategame you will have power issues.