Energy Exchanger

[Vlad cool Gh0zt]

What is the point of having a energy exchanger?? The accumulators charge and discharge automatically anyway, so I don't see any point of having this building. Or am I completely missing something?

[flame192]

The difference is the charge speed and the fact that you can charge accumulators on one planet and send them to another one to discharge them.

[Vlad cool Gh0zt]

Oh, you mean accumulators can charge faster with Energy Exchange? And to transfer power from planet to planet you need Energy Exchanger on each planet?

[flame192]

Yes, accumulators are strange buildings since they also act as input and output for energy exchangers. Instead of building them they are handled like an item and can therefore be shipped to another planet. Of course you need to build charging/discharging facilities on each planet.

[Zigamus]

They can also be set up in such a way as to work to make sure you have power if your other power methods stutter and fail, like being too slow to deliver rods, makes the system that delivers the rods shut down. These battery back-ups can keep enough of it running to use the rods once you can make more of, or deliver them.

For a good explanation of all this and a good video about it search Nilaus on YT, he also has a great blueprint for this.

[Bolle]

Personally I use Accumulators inbetween production setups as a filler to maximize space efficiency combined with wind turbines (turbine accu accu turbine fits perfecly), if it is reasonable to use turbines.
It works as a buffer when power usage is close to max power generation but ILS tend to exceed it when charging after a long trip warp.

Accus are also fine in eraly game when starting an outpost. Slab down some solars and accus and leave it.

Otherwise accus are the only form of energy transport between planets. Therefore one needs Energy Exchangers to charge at A and discharge at B.
Also accus can be used as mass energy storage in a facility which locally charges / discharges with exchangers to buffer more power than a placed accu can handle.

[JoaoPSJC]

Energy Exchanger is the only automated way to charge accumulators and it also does it faster than by placing the accumulators. Some buildings, like the Orbital Collector, require charged accumulators as material for their production.

[MazdaEldorado]

I now use Artificial Stars on planets I'm just beginning to tap into but before that point I used the Accumulators and Energy Exchangers to power new worlds. Overall I found this method a big messy so I stopped. I suppose in the spirit of the game, you'd use this method by charging them in your Dyson Sphere systems and moving them into outside systems. It did always seem kind of funny that Dyson Spheres are these massive things of boundless energy production but I'm still just laying down dozens of Artificial Stars due to the ease of it.

[Schalimah]

In mid game I use energy exchangers to make sure I can burn off excess hydrogen.
You just put a couple thermal reactors and an energy exchanger in charge mod on a separate grid.
Then you belt the charged accumulators to another exchanger on your main grid to discharge.
This ensures that your thermal reactors can burn off hydrogene at max rate even if your main grid is not under full load.
Add one wind turbine to the burner grid to make sure, that the sorters always have enough power to grab stuff from the belts should the reactors run out of fuel.

[Ketamarine]

Is the issue Nilhaus points out where they discharge before all renewable and sphere/swarm power is used fixed?
IE. Do they only discharge when no other power is available?

[Rekal]

Originally posted by Ketamarine:

Is the issue Nilhaus points out where they discharge before all renewable and sphere/swarm power is used fixed?
IE. Do they only discharge when no other power is available?

No, Energy Exchangers still discharge as first priority. They are not designed to act as a battery alone, they are an energy delivery system. There are ways around it, as I'm pretty sure Nilaus mentioned.

You can pair each discharger with a charger to create a buffer -- Only provides power to the grid when it is needed. Empty energy exchangers need to be shipped elsewhere to charge. This is probably the setup you're looking for and is the setup I remember Nilaus constructing in his videos.

Or you can pair two chargers for each discharger to create a battery -- Charges with grid excess and provides power when it is needed. 1 discharger and 2 chargers with 50 accumulators in the loop is the same as having 50 accumulators set down as buildings but with a slightly smaller footprint. You can also include an PLS or ILS in the loop to have way more than 50 accumulators worth of energy storage -- the power input/output will still be the same as 50 accumulators though but you can easily scale it up by adding more sets to the same loop.

[hellminister]

I wonder why they dont let us set the priority of the power generation, for exemple from a range of 1 to 5 with 1 the highest priority, this way we could do things like

1 - Excess burn-off thermal plant
2 - renewable energy (solar, wind, dyson)
3 - energy exchangers
4 - non-renewable energy (thermal, fusion, sun)
5 - energy exchangers (batteries)

it would permit us to have a lower footprint and a better control of how we design the factories

[Rekal]

Originally posted by hellminister:

I wonder why they dont let us set the priority of the power generation, for exemple from a range of 1 to 5 with 1 the highest priority, this way we could do things like

1 - Excess burn-off thermal plant
2 - renewable energy (solar, wind, dyson)
3 - energy exchangers
4 - non-renewable energy (thermal, fusion, sun)
5 - energy exchangers (batteries)

it would permit us to have a lower footprint and a better control of how we design the factories

Extra overhead in processor usage, extra coding, extra GUI assets, design, and modification, extra testing and QA, and other priorities would suffer. Same with any product, if you try to add too much during development you end up with feature creep like Star Citizen. A priority power system just isn't at the top of their list.

It's not that big of a deal though, you can do all those things currently...even though there's no reason to.
1 - Set your burners on a separate grid with a few wind turbines to keep the sorters going. Use an energy exchanger in charge mode to soak all the power off of them, belt the results back to your main grid and use a discharge mode to dump the power back on your grid. Now your burn-off plant's power is being dumped on the grid at first priority.

Though I recommend taking another look at your factories and the refinery recipes. There's no need to ever burn off hydrogen unless you are expressly doing it for power. If you're struggling with the results from fire-ice to graphene then Casimir Crystals, and Anti-matter fuel cells are huge hydrogen hogs with Deuterium Fuel Cells fed from fractionators being right up there.

2 and 3 - happen naturally if you setup an exchanger buffer loop. 1 to 1 charge/discharge and the energy exchanger power only gets uses after the renewable power runs out.

4 - Doing 4 after 2 is a little more complex though it can still be done. Assuming you're shipping accumulators in for 3, you can create your non-renewable power on a separate grid. Use EE's to charge accumulators and belt it to your previous EE buffer loop to create a janky battery loop. Feed it in as a second priority and then the power from the non-renewable plants isn't used unless the accumulators shipped in dry out. This seems like a poor choice though.

5 - happens normally if you set the EE battery loop correctly.

All of this is pointless though, because the non-renewable power plants throttle perfectly with no efficiency loss. Adding more plants doesn't increase fuel costs, it just increases capacity...so there's no need to bother with battery systems or complex power priority systems. Just build more power plants.

[Ketamarine]

Originally posted by Rekal:

Originally posted by hellminister:

I wonder why they dont let us set the priority of the power generation, for exemple from a range of 1 to 5 with 1 the highest priority, this way we could do things like

1 - Excess burn-off thermal plant
2 - renewable energy (solar, wind, dyson)
3 - energy exchangers
4 - non-renewable energy (thermal, fusion, sun)
5 - energy exchangers (batteries)

it would permit us to have a lower footprint and a better control of how we design the factories

Extra overhead in processor usage, extra coding, extra GUI assets, design, and modification, extra testing and QA, and other priorities would suffer. Same with any product, if you try to add too much during development you end up with feature creep like Star Citizen. A priority power system just isn't at the top of their list.

It's not that big of a deal though, you can do all those things currently...even though there's no reason to.
1 - Set your burners on a separate grid with a few wind turbines to keep the sorters going. Use an energy exchanger in charge mode to soak all the power off of them, belt the results back to your main grid and use a discharge mode to dump the power back on your grid. Now your burn-off plant's power is being dumped on the grid at first priority.

Though I recommend taking another look at your factories and the refinery recipes. There's no need to ever burn off hydrogen unless you are expressly doing it for power. If you're struggling with the results from fire-ice to graphene then Casimir Crystals, and Anti-matter fuel cells are huge hydrogen hogs with Deuterium Fuel Cells fed from fractionators being right up there.

2 and 3 - happen naturally if you setup an exchanger buffer loop. 1 to 1 charge/discharge and the energy exchanger power only gets uses after the renewable power runs out.

4 - Doing 4 after 2 is a little more complex though it can still be done. Assuming you're shipping accumulators in for 3, you can create your non-renewable power on a separate grid. Use EE's to charge accumulators and belt it to your previous EE buffer loop to create a janky battery loop. Feed it in as a second priority and then the power from the non-renewable plants isn't used unless the accumulators shipped in dry out. This seems like a poor choice though.

5 - happens normally if you set the EE battery loop correctly.

All of this is pointless though, because the non-renewable power plants throttle perfectly with no efficiency loss. Adding more plants doesn't increase fuel costs, it just increases capacity...so there's no need to bother with battery systems or complex power priority systems. Just build more power plants.

It is a big deal. That is way too complicated for like 90% of players. Devs should just make it kick in after solar, wind, geothermal and receivers - IE. after all the free power, but below the power that takes up resources.

[Rekal]

Originally posted by Ketamarine:

It is a big deal. That is way too complicated for like 90% of players. Devs should just make it kick in after solar, wind, geothermal and receivers - IE. after all the free power, but below the power that takes up resources.

I totally agree. Those solutions are too complex to try to work out, but you skipped the part where I said there was no reason to in the first place. Power priority isn't a big deal if there is a clearly superior option in power production.

Right now, because the power generating buildings that burn fuel throttle up and down perfectly, instantly, and with no waste there is no proper incentive to create alternate battery storage solutions or focus on renewable energy. I only do it because I think it's neat. I'll admit I'm kind of a geek that way. All of the possible complex solutions in comparison are inferior to simply adding more power plants.

TL;DR for the rest - Opinion: Renewable energy is inferior to all other power producers. Don't bother building it beyond what you need to start. Energy Exchangers don't even produce power. You can skip using them too. Unless you think either is neat.

Power density of solar is only ~70% the power density of crude oil processed through x-ray cracking proliferated and then burned in thermal plants. Geothermal I think is only slightly more dense than solar.

You can progress past relying on crude oil to orbital collectors so quickly you'll probably never notice the dip in oil output. Burning straight hydrogen has even smaller footprint than the crude oil processing setup and the fuel from your local gas giant is effectively free. It also has the added benefit of retrofitting directly into your old oil burning setups.

Mini-fusion is the next power step with an area power density roughly equivalent to Energy Exchangers...but Energy Exchangers don't actually produce power. So anything you're trying to power with Energy Exchangers is going to require an equally large back end on top of the power plants to charge it.

Creating the mini-fusion fuel at 1/s rate including proliferation with extra products all the way through would take: 4.4/s iron ore, 2.3/s coal, 0.6/s copper ore, 0.8/s titanium ore, 0.7/s sulfuric acid (Unlimited), 0.4/s Fire-ice (Unlimited), and an additional 7.9/s hydrogen (Unlimited) shipped in and will draw 47MW of power. That 1/s deuterium fuel rods production when proliferated will fuse in 40 mini-fusion plants for a total of 750MW.

Combining 8.1/s of the most common materials available almost everywhere with 9/s more unlimited resources to create net +703MW of power is a no-brainer. Something has to charge those accumulators, right? 703/8.1 = 86.7MW per common ore/s you'll probably never run out of. And remember, there's no waste energy because of the perfect throttling.

Once your Dyson Sphere is up, skip trying to use the Ray Receivers to collect power, this is the renewable energy setting. Inherently inferior once again. Stick to Critical Photons, it's the most effective way by area to draw massive power from the sphere.

Switching to anti-matter fuel is even more efficient in space and resources than fusion. The anti-matter fuel produced at a rate of 1/s takes 10/s common ore inputs with 139MW of power draw from the grid and the output fuels 100 artificial stars for a total output of 7.2GW. Coincidentally, the critical photons needed require 7.2GW of of Dyson Sphere Capacity plus the efficiency losses...Funny how that works out.

The net output is 7.06GW so 7.06/10 = 706MW per common ore/s. Your vein utilization research will eventually reach a point where your resources are virtually unlimited. No need to ever worry about running out of ores to 'burn.'

Like I said there was no reason in the first place to mess with the convoluted energy priority loops beyond personal preference. Even a proper power priority system is made irrelevant by the 'build more power plants' meta.

If power plants burned their fuel at 100% rate all the time or had some waste efficiency loss at less than peak performance, then there would be an incentive to create alternate energy solutions to reach higher efficiencies but they don't. An artificial star will output at 0.00000125% rate to power the 9kw idle sorter attached to it taking more than 25 years to burn through one anti-matter fuel rod. Math is probably off but you get the idea.

Unless the devs decide to increase the complexity of the power grid specifics and move away from 'build more power plants' then any complex alternate solutions we want to use is really just us playing the sandbox. Power priority isn't a big deal when there is a clear winner in power production. I still like my energy exchanger loops though. :(

[josmith7]

Originally posted by Rekal:

If power plants burned their fuel at 100% rate all the time or had some waste efficiency loss at less than peak performance, then there would be an incentive to create alternate energy solutions to reach higher efficiencies but they don't. An artificial star will output at 0.00000125% rate to power the 9kw idle sorter attached to it taking more than 25 years to burn through one anti-matter fuel rod. Math is probably off but you get the idea.

Out of amusement I worked out the proper math
Artificial star output: 72 MW (aka 72,000 kW)*
Sorter idle draw: 9000 W (aka 9 kW)
power draw = 0.0125% of the artificial star.

Antimatter fuel rod energy: 7.2 GJ (aka 2000.16 kWh)
2000.16 kWh / 9 kW = 222.24 hours (aka 9 days, 6 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds)



However it'd be equally efficient if it was only powering an adjacent piler or spray coater (idle power 4500 W; aka 4.5 kW) at 0.00625% power draw; and lasting twice as long


---
* twice that with best proliferation, but since that doesn't increase the energy storage of the antimatter fuel rod I'm ignoring that.