Energy exchanger array to charge or discharge

[pemmons1]

For when a planet sometimes produces power that you wish to capture and at other times has a deficit-- I've long wondered how to do this. Someone has made a heavy-duty blueprint for the purpose (blue belts everywhere) and complicated, using stone or some other input to control flow. Frankly I don't quite understand it and am not certain that it even works properly.

The author is obviously a smart guy who has put much thought into the issue, so I can hardly believe that anything simpler would work, but what do you think of this?: The idea consists basically in installing more charging than discharging energy exchangers. Put down enough dischargers to cover any anticipated deficits and the same number of chargers + enough to cover any expected surplus. If there is a deficit, the chargers will be partly idle. Given a surplus, all dischargers will be working but so will enough chargers to cancel them out. Then the extra chargers will give you full accumulators to export. It must merely be understood that you need the ability to import and export both empty and full accumulators, so two logistical stations must be involved. I haven't tried this scheme yet, it but it seems to me that it should do the job.

Does anyone address this situation with such a method (or any other)?

[josmith7]

Yes, that should work okay as long as you set up the belts so you can't easily clog them up and stop accumulators moving.


This is similar to a common "balancing" exchangers setup; often used to force discharging energy exchanges to effectively work as the power production of last resort, rather than their normal action of being first resort (which might be nice if its saving fuel from your thermal plants; but is stupid when it's "saving" the free solar, wind, or geothermal from those plants)

That balancing setup optionally includes an ILS to ship in additional full accumulators from off-world if they run low (and return empties if you get to many). Allowing it to continue to cover long term power production shortfalls. (And if you have the same number of exchangers set to charging and to discharging then you'll never produce a surplus of charged accumulators)



If you want excess energy to be turned into surplus charged accumulators then, as you indicated, you just devote more exchangers to charging then there are set to discharging. (You'd also slightly unbalance it towards charging if you wanted it to act purely as an on-planet battery; without any connection to an ILS. That way you'd end up with as few empty accumulators as possible after any period of excess energy production)



However as you want yours to work bidirectionally -- able to import or export either full or empty accumulators you should be careful to ensure that newly arrived empty accumulators can't just move to the other ILS for export again as empty accumulators -- otherwise you'll end up shipping the same ones back and forth across your cluster as fast as your vessels can manage -- wasting a lot of warpers (and using a lot of energy recharging ILS) for no benefit.

[pemmons1]

> ensure that newly arrived empty accumulators can't just move to the other ILS for export again

Thanks for the reassurance; and yes, I am aware of this possible mistake. And I've just thought of a way to test the setup. Assuming you are on a planet or a network that has a small surplus of power, just plop down an ILS and connect it. This will immediately demand at least another 30 MW, changing the surplus to a deficit, and you can set it to much more demand if desired.

I haven't paid much attention to the "balancing exchanger" blueprints available, except the one I mentioned, because I had the impression that a user had to decide whether the planet was an exporter or an importer of energy, it couldn't be both at different times. Perhaps I was mistaken there, in which case I would be just reinventing the wheel.

[pemmons1]

Well, I tried it and it seems to have passed a stress test etc. Made a blueprint called "Flexchangers". and plan on using it on every planet settled, except those which have outstanding possibilities for power production and can quickly be made export-only. I don't want to try publishing it yet, but perhaps a description will enable readers to try it if interested.

It is symmetrical to make it neat and understandable. First, place two ILSes as close together as possible on an east-west axis. (Normally, pairs or strings of stations should be north-south of one another). ILS#1 imports full and exports empty accumulators. #2 is vice versa.

On the far side of #1 go two discharging exchangers north-south of each other, and the far side of #2 has three charging, with a splitter between the members of each pair to supply them from the nearby ILS. All of these can be extended outward with additional exchangers to increase capacity. The entire layout, then, will go east-west as it should. Outputs of the exchangers on each side are daisy-chained (they can run through the
exchangers), with final output belts running alongside the ILSes, one in each direction.

The system is deliberately greedy with accumulators. Via prioritized splitters, the empty and full accumulator output belts first feed the respective "remote demand" slots. Only when one of these is is full (up to whatever limit you have set in the ILS) will the corresponding "remote supply" slot in the other station receive any accumulators for export. This should minimize shipping while gradually stocking the system for whatever need, regardless of which kind of accumulator is more plentiful at first. (In my case, there weren't many either full or empty, but the home planet is slowly supplying both).

Three empty slots remain in each ILS, with several unused ports reasonably accessible. One of these would be ideal to receive warpers for the planet. A conveyor belt runs between the two stations with a splitter, depot, and logistics distributor in the center, which can send warpers to to every other ILS on the planet. If the layout is built near one or more ore veins, slots can become outlets for these ores, These unassigned slots can really be put to any industrial use.

[josmith7]

Just be aware of the final risks of accumulator transfer based power -- issues caused by expanding or shrinking the network.

The self-evident one is that as you drop these exchange bases on more planets you'll need more accumulators - lest planets get left without power because there simply aren't enough "batteries" to go around.


But if you start removing these exchange bases, or their worlds run out of demand for power, say as they're mined out), you can also end up out of power. This time dues to such a surplus of accumulators that there's no demand for them -- so the export buffers just fill up. If they fill up all the way the belts can jam; and now accumulators can't flow and so charging and discharging fails because the accumulators can't move.

(Now, since every one of your bases can import or export either type you'll have a lot of buffer capacity in all the ILS; which should delay reaching that point compared to a single power generating planet. So you might be fine; but it is a risk. Consider putting in traffic monitors to alert you if the accumulator belt throughput ever drops to 0 -- so at least you know to manually intervene)

-- Also, this second failure can happen if you have an accumulator production line constantly adding accumulators to a fixed size network. Once there are too many accumulators for the size of your network bad things happen.

[pemmons1]

Yes, I realized that this system could store at least twice as many accumulators as a one-way array of stations. A shortage of empty accumulators is just a lost opportunity, but when a demand for full accumulators goes unfulfilled, it could be a crisis. So I must be sure that no planet hogs the entire stock and leaves others starving. In the past, I have had two ILSes on the home planet close together, one importing full accumulators and feeding into the second, which exports them. Between them, or otherwise leading out from the importing ILS, storage can be built. As long as the exporting ILS is full, it should be safe to store full accumulators showing up in the importing ILS, especially if the slot exporting empties is also filling up. The large holding capacity of logistical stations provides plenty of time to make any necessary adjustments.

[pemmons1]

On the general subject of power management, CovertGuardian's guide "Energy Exchange Examples" shows how to use fueled power sources only as needed.

Charging accumulators on one planet and discharging them on another is a fairly obvious and easy concept to grasp. His insight is that we can do likewise on a single planet with two networks, as separate electrically as two planets would be, although they can be very near each other physically. The two networks are connected by belts, instead of vessels, carrying accumulators.

If passive sources are providing enough power to the main network, then a balanced set of exchangers simply recycles accumulators within itself. A need for more power sends empty accumulators across to one or more charging exchangers on the second network. Now this network has a demand for power, and fueled generators go into action to supply it. Otherwise there is no demand, and they are idle. This second network must also have either a small, reliable passive source or a full accumulator on the ground to start up the generators' sorters. Accumulators filled by the exchanger(s) in the second network are conveyed back to those in the main network.

It looks to me as though a combination of these two ideas ("flexchangers" and fueled sources active only as needed), expanded as necessary and with the generators progressively updated with more sophisticated facilities up to artificial stars, could constitute an admirably versatile yet thrifty power strategy.