Thermal power station

[Mertock]

How does it actually works, resources, supply ?

[vkobe]

you throw wood, coal, oil in it

[Songbird]

If you don't totally meet your factory's power demands, it produces 2.16 MW of power by burning fuel at that rate at 80% efficiency. If you're not familiar, one Watt (W) is one Joule (J) per second. So it will use up 2.16 MJ / 0.80 = 2.70 MJ of fuel per second, or 2700 kJ of fuel per second, and turn 80% of that into energy for your factory.

However, if you have more power production than your factory needs, all of it is throttled to use an equal percent of its maximum capacity. So if you have a mix of wind, solar, and thermal power sources and your factory only needs 50% of what they could all produce together, then all of them will produce 50% of the power they could (meaning the thermal plants burn fuel at 50% speed, but the renewable power sources just effectively waste some of their potential.)

[Draken]

I manly use thermal power stations around oil processing.
Oil is infinite and all the products can be burned.
This is also a good way to prevent your oil processing from shutting down completely by burning off whatever you have to much of.

You can chain thermal power stations together by building them next to each other and then feeding the first into the second with sorters.

Thermal power stations are great if you have spikes in your power consumption in the early game that the renewables can't handle. Or use them to charge some accumulators.

They burn a lot of stuff. From wood, graphite, oil up to diamonds. Just look at the resource, if the fuel type is chemical it can be burned.