Solved..: solar panels do not charge battery

[Delle(DK)]

Hello
I have made a successfull landing on a planet with the std. ship.
When I landed I build a base and one of the new white "connector blocks" (white/grey/squareblock) I think they are named.
Next I build a connector block on my ship and dock it to my station so the ship and station now are merged as 1 big station so the respawn ship do not dissaper when I die or logout of the game.

However after I did this I have been unable to recharge my batterys with solar panels, and only way I can recharge antyhing is using the small reactor that is in the ship.

It does not matter if I place the solar panels on "the ship" or on the station it self, it will not charge the batterys.
I tried to build solar panels on the outside hull of the ship it self and they also do not want to recharge.

- I did not build a cockpit/command control on the base but just use the one that was in the std.ship, coudl this be the problem ?
- will it solve my problem to "undock" and then recycle the entire ship and build a new base ?

I was simply wondering if there is some kind of trick to make them work.

Thank you all for the answers and help in advance

[Delle(DK)]

I found the solution.
I had to remove the constrol station in the ship and build it again "outside" on my new base. Somehow there was a conflict that resulted in solar panels not being able to transfer electricity anywhere..

[Voice From Beyond]

There is a power issue with batteries atm. If you have 1 battery set to "auto" and nothing using power, you can see in the battery control panel 0 input and 0 output. If you add solar panels that generate 300 kwh, you can now see the battery charging at 300 kwh. Now if you turn something on, say a refinery that uses 280 kwh, the battery will display 20 kwh input and 280 kwh output.

What happened to 280 kwh? The battery is actually discharging to run the refinery and the solar panels are still generating 300 kwh. It seems both the battery and solar panels are each supplying 280 kwh to the refinery for 560 total when the refinery only requires 280 total.

[Gotschy]

Originally posted by Voice From Behind:

What happened to 280 kwh? The battery is actually discharging to run the refinery and the solar panels are still generating 300 kwh. It seems both the battery and solar panels are each supplying 280 kwh to the refinery for 560 total when the refinery only requires 280 total.

shouldnt the refinary get its power "throught" the battery? like an online UPS ?

[Robo]

When playing online we usually manage to fix this by either rebuilding the solar panels or turning them completely on/off (including the battery).

[Voice From Beyond]

Originally posted by SkTC pyromanian:

Originally posted by Voice From Behind:

What happened to 280 kwh? The battery is actually discharging to run the refinery and the solar panels are still generating 300 kwh. It seems both the battery and solar panels are each supplying 280 kwh to the refinery for 560 total when the refinery only requires 280 total.

shouldnt the refinary get its power "throught" the battery? like an online UPS ?

Then the input to the battery should say 300 kwh. And why is the battery draining instead of charging?

Originally posted by Robo:

When playing online we usually manage to fix this by either rebuilding the solar panels or turning them completely on/off (including the battery).

I'll give this a try, although since this is an offline game. I have reloaded it several times and that did not fix the problem.

[Voice From Beyond]

There is no option to turn solar panels on/off, but turning the battery off/on seems to have solved the issue, if the battery is set to recharge. A battery in smart mode works as stated above, broken.

[Frizzio]

I still have this issue.... same thing as above.. tryed to turn on/off batteries and solar pannels with no result, i did build a new control station still no fix, all batteries are now set in recharge mode, i shuted them off and i left only one battery on in recharge mode, the rest of the whole station is set to off, got six solar pannels still no recharges..... help?

[EldenRingMaster523]

Originally posted by Robo:

When playing online we usually manage to fix this by either rebuilding the solar panels or turning them completely on/off (including the battery).

This worked for me, still annoying to have to do this though.

[EldenRingMaster523]

Originally posted by Voice From Beyond:

There is no option to turn solar panels on/off, but turning the battery off/on seems to have solved the issue, if the battery is set to recharge. A battery in smart mode works as stated above, broken.

You turn any block off in the terminal, "Toggle Block on/off"

[Atophy]

Originally posted by Punk:

Originally posted by Voice From Beyond:

There is no option to turn solar panels on/off, but turning the battery off/on seems to have solved the issue, if the battery is set to recharge. A battery in smart mode works as stated above, broken.

You turn any block off in the terminal, "Toggle Block on/off"

I think the batteries and solar panels are having a conflict for which is supplying the power, each tries to supply full power, no sharing the load. I'm trying to build a hovering platform and my batteries are drawing at about 980kw leaving me just over 3 hours. The sun was up, each of my panels was generating around 80 odd kw at the time, nothing was charging and battery draw remained constant even though it should have been going down with load sharing. once I landed and shut off the engines however, the batteries started charging so it could be that both are trying to power at once.

Edit: Apparently its an old bug... found this on redit.. needs to be fixed up Keen !!
"
[–]thetank19 3 points 1 year ago
It's due to your battery setup. If you don't have your batteries setup in either recharge, discharge or semi mode, the batteries will output the amount of power it will require to charge your base while also taking in power from your solar cells. however it will also subtract this power from your solar cells.

Example:
If you have a solar cell generating 100W and your base requires 30W,
If your battery is in recharge mode
solar output: 100W
battery input: 70W
base input: 30W
I
f your battery is in no mode
solar output: 70W
battery input: 70W
battery output: 30W
base input: 30W

If this is still a little confusing play around with you battery settings and look at how much output your solar panels have.
"

[Milan Bozzano Navara]

Guys, after a lot of observation i realised that the system is working as it should, there is no bug. The problem is with how the data is being presented to us in the control panel. Here is what i have implemented.
I have a series of solar panels that combined show Max output of 241 kW and current output of 81. My station power consumption is around 160 kW, which is the exact difference between the max and the current.
I have three batteries that are charging in spite of the control panel showing a current input lower than the current output for the batteries. The last sentence even says the the batteries will be depleted in about 2 days, yet the stored power is growing, and if you divide what is left to recharge by the INPUT power, and not the difference between input and output, you get the exact number of hours/days left to charge, even if it says that it is for the depletion.
What i think happened is that the OUTPUT data on the batteries considers the power from the solar panels that passes through them to feed the system. And the INPUT data shows the power being used to charge the battery. So in Atrophy's example, both data mean the same thing.

[Milan Bozzano Navara]

I just realised that it is in fact a bug. If you let the batteries in no mode, half the energy produced by the solar panels is wasted but if you set them to recharge, and the power need of the station is higher than what the solar panels produce, the station will still work and suck no power from the batteries, FREE POWER.

[MrNo]

As you can see, the bug's been around for a while (OP is from late 2015), on and off. It resurfaced around 2 stable updates ago. Power does, in fact, dissapear from the system.

My best current solution is the avoid battery recharge mode, period. Fun fact: setting a battery to recharge while using a connecter (small ship - station) will prevent you from turning recharge off when you disconnect, until world reload. Sometimes. Other times it just gets stuck on recharge permanently - UI updates fine, but energy flow behavior doesn't change.

As long as you have excess energy, you *should* be good. I'd keep an empty reactor sitting around on anything important though, just in case you need a jumpstart.

Incidentally, anyone know why the Max Power field of Solar Panels is variable? Seems like it should be fixed... but it very clearly is not.

[Atophy]

Originally posted by Stannis Barathrum:

Guys, after a lot of observation i realised that the system is working as it should, there is no bug. The problem is with how the data is being presented to us in the control panel. Here is what i have implemented.
I have a series of solar panels that combined show Max output of 241 kW and current output of 81. My station power consumption is around 160 kW, which is the exact difference between the max and the current.
I have three batteries that are charging in spite of the control panel showing a current input lower than the current output for the batteries. The last sentence even says the the batteries will be depleted in about 2 days, yet the stored power is growing, and if you divide what is left to recharge by the INPUT power, and not the difference between input and output, you get the exact number of hours/days left to charge, even if it says that it is for the depletion.
What i think happened is that the OUTPUT data on the batteries considers the power from the solar panels that passes through them to feed the system. And the INPUT data shows the power being used to charge the battery. So in Atrophy's example, both data mean the same thing.

My current ship, when I trim to essential systems for minimal power use with reactors and batteries turned off, operates entirely on roughly 50% of solar output from 10 panels.
Each of 10 panels max roughly 119kw when facing the sun with an output of 70kw while batteries and reactors off, 119w max and roughly 50kw output when batteries are on with no mode selected, each of 40 batteries are showing a 7.17kw input and an 8.3kw output.
(Values are rough due to the movement of the sun and the time it takes to navigate the menus)

Batteries are a poor tertiary power source because they are still providing power when solar on its own exceeds demand AND they reduce the draw on solar capacity, the excess of the solar capacity should be used to charge the batteries after the ships systems are powered by the hierarchy of power systems, reactor, battery, solar.
Either it is working and the HUD and info for solar and batteries are not displaying actual values or its not working as it logically should.

I just want to make the most efficient use of my solar power as is possible to reduce my use of uranium, I liken it to gasoline in the space engineers universe. Currently, the only way to do this is to skip using batteries entirely, but that wastes excess solar production. Sure, you could switch them back and forth manually from charge to discharge, but that requires micromanagement and detracts from gameplay. Solar panels should be running at max capacity at all times as long as there's a demand for their output.

[ZombieHunter]

Incidentally, anyone know why the Max Power field of Solar Panels is variable? Seems like it should be fixed... but it very clearly is not.

I took max power as meaning the max power they can output given their current angle to the sun. I'm not sure what the theoretical max power of the panels is since it is not listed. The entire GUI for solar panels and batteries is terrible. The information is very misleading and hard to understand what is going on.

The best angle would be 0 degrees to the sun since that would put the sun directly overhead. Then max power likely equals the max power output the panels can product. Other angles likely are computed with dot product:

public class Vector3
{
   // I don't think Space Engineers C# supports auto-implemented properties
   // These would need to be made into properties with backing stores
   public float x { get; set;}
   public float y { get; set;}
   public float z { get; set;}

   public Vector3(float px, float py, float pz)
   {
     x = px;
     y = py;
     z = pz;
   }
}

float Vector3Dot(Vector3 v1, Vector3 v2)
{
  return ( (v1.x * v2.x) + (v1.y * v2.y) + (v1.z * v2.z));
}

Vector3 Vector3Normalize(Vector3 v)
{
   float length = sqrtf((v.x * v.x) + (v.y * v.y) + (v.z * v.z));

   // Possible divide by zero here   
   float oneOverLength = 1.0f / (length == 0.0f ? 1.0f : length);

   // Multiplying by (1.0f / length) is a divide by length but faster than floating
   // point divide
   return new Vector3(v.x * oneOverLength, v.y * oneOverLength, v.z * oneOverLength);
}

public class SolarPanelScript
{
   public void CalculateMaxPower()
   {
       // Compute vector from solar panel to sun
       Vector3 toSun = SolarPanel.Position - Sun.Position;

       // Normalize toSun vector
       toSun = Vector3Normalize(toSun);

       // Compute dot product between solar panel facing or look vector and toSun
       float dp = Vector3Dot(SolarPanel.Look, toSun);

       // Compute solar panel output
       SolarPanel.CurrentMaxPower = SolarPanel.MaxPower * dp;

       // If dot product is negative the sun is underneath the panel, clamp to zero
       if (SolarPanel.CurrentMaxPower <= 0.0f)
       {
           SolarPanel.CurrentMaxPower = 0.0f;
       }
   }
}

Note that checking for length == 0.0f is problematic and would need to be a bit more involved since floating point math is innacurate and thus checking for equality is incorrect.

The solar panel Look vector is assumed to be pointing in the direction that the flat panels of the solar panels point when right side up. In other words draw a vector from the flat side to infinity in both directions and that is the 'look' vector I'm assuming in the equations. It should already be normalized so no need to normalize it.

Essentially the same formula used for Dot3 lighting can be used for the panels. When the dot product is 1.0f the sun is overhead and when 0.0f it is side on to the panels. So if you take the dot product times the theoretical max power the panels can produce you will get multiply by 1.0f when overhead so when overhead the current max power of a panel is the theoretical max power the panel can produce. If the dot product is negative it means the sun is beneath the panel which will cause the value to be negative and thus you simply clamp to zero for no output. So the power looks like this:

In local or model space:
.......1.0.........
0.0....(P)......0.0
.......-1.0........

Where P is the panel and the numbers are the location of the sun with respect to the panel and the value of the dot product at that location. Note this only works if the vectors in the equation are normalized. Note that the orientation of this system can be any orientation. All that matters is the angle of the sun with respect to the panel regardless of the orientation of the panel.

I could probably write some c# similar to the above code for a programmable block that would give more information about the power output. Also using a variant of this code I could also make solar panels that 'track' the sun through the sky and stop tracking when out of range.

To track the sun all one needs to do is take the dot product that was calculated and rotate by the arccos of this value around the z axis of the panel. Rotation must be constrained to Z or you would product a 'turret' of sorts that could rotate to face the sun at any orientation.

Of course the programmable block would need to be attached to a rotor and the panel connected to the rotor to actually get the panel to rotate and track the sun. All that is required is that code and a simple construct.