Placing Too Many Accumulators?

[valenti_scott]

I was reading in an old thread about a .84 ratio of accumulators to solar panels being ideal. But it's not quite that simple, because you need an excess of energy production during the day which the accumulators will absorb and then give back at night.

A simple example might be two pumpjacks out in the middle of nowhere, so I want to make them solar powered. Three solar panels are just right to keep them powered during the day. To keep them powered during the night, I think I should have three additional solar panels, with three total accumlators attached.

Then I noticed, in my central main complex, I'd been mindlessly building solar panels and accumulators in about an even ratio and placing them around the campus, but if I'm not creating excess electrical power, the accumulators are not really accomplishing anything?

I guess a related question is, if you have a set-up of a steam power plant with solar panels and accumulators, if the steam power plant has the capacity for it, will it charge up the accumlators, or will it only provide enough power to keep "other stuff" running if the solar is not enough (during the day)?

I'm about to answer my own question. On the Electric Network Info window, during the beginning of the day, you can see the accumulators showing up as normal consumption devices while they are charging. If you look at one of your steam engines, you can see that it is running at 100% performance. Then, when the accumlators are all charged up, the performance of the steam engines drops off.

You might be wondering why I have a steam power plant at all, if I'm going solar. I am gradually reducing the size of my power plant. It used to have ten steam engines, and now it has only six. And I'm approching the end-game, working on the rocket silo tech, so I'll probably not go completely solar, but maybe in the next game!

-Scott

[Nailfoot]

Thorough. And you are right. YOu need to have enough accumulators to deal with your factory.

I have 60,000 solar panels, give or take, and about 55,000 accumulators. I also run 1700 steam engines full time. I do nothing fancy with the steam engines, I just let them run whenever they want to.

Works ok for me.

[Zaflis]

0.84 ratio is good (84 accumulators for every 100 solar panels). But if you ask if you can ever have too many, say 1:1 ratio is possible too but slightly wasteful to resources. Laser turrets can sometimes cause an unexpectedly big spike in your power grid so you need alot of accumulators. If you run out of power in the early morning, simply build more of both accumulators and solar panels.

Power use priority is Solar panels > Steam engines > Accumulators. So during the night even if accumulators are full, it will use all that it can from steam engines first. Some might say that's not a good thing, and try to circuit it to become a backup power with lesser priority than accumulators. Because you waste fuel with it.

[Diesel]

It's optimal to have 21 acculators for every 25 solar panels. Too many solar panels isn't a bad thing but the acculators will not charge any faster because they have a max intake of 300kw. Not enough solar panels will cause your acculators to not be fully charged at the end of the day, which might cause you to have a power outage in thew middle of the night.

It's just simpler to remember that acculators can only give and take 300kW, anything over that will be wasted and anything under will not charge the capacitor as fast.

[Warlord]

The reason for the ratio is to get rid of the "pointless addition" of additional panels/accumulators inefficiently. If you have JUST enough panels to charge the accumulators in time for night, and just enough batteries that they almost run out before day, then think about what happens if you add more of either
1. More accumulators will mean that the batteries won't fully charge by night. They won't empty out earlier either, because the power is divided among all the accumulators, and each will last slightly longer. In other words, they do not contribute to your base power system.
2. More solar panels. If your accumulators charge fully before night, then any excess solar will be wasted. Thrown away. The resources that went into making them was worthless (at the time)

Obviously we don't have perfect setups. Power demands will surge or decline, so you will always either waste excess power (not enough storage) or not have enough power (not enough panels). The ratio is the best way to minimize resource waste by having too much of one thing or the other.

Of course, it's personal choice. I use a ratio that is 4:3 solar:accumulators, because I like the look of the blueprint and it works well enough. Resources are cheap. It's not really worth worrying over it to much of a degree.

[MisterSpock]

I use 1:1 because of the look too.

In the beginning just using solar at daylight is ok. Later (still medgame) you may place a fec accus more than needed, just for the case.

[AlexMBrennan]

I was reading in an old thread about a .84 ratio of accumulators to solar panels being ideal. But it's not quite that simple, because you need an excess of energy production during the day which the accumulators will absorb and then give back at night.

I think you are missing the point here. The ratio was found by looking at the average power output of solar panels over a day (42kW) - that is to say you could continuously run a 42kW machine if you were able to perfectly store the power producted by a single solar panel.

Obviously this means that you need more than one solar panel if you want to run a 60kW machine continously - if your solar panels can barely power your machines at noon when solar power is at its peak then you can't store any energy for nighttime.

Next, you can work out how many accumulators are needed to perfectly store the excess power during the day, which happens to be 0.84 x number of solar panels.

tl;dr: To find out how many solar panels you need you need to divide your factory's power usage by 42kW, then multiply that number by 0.84 to find out how many accumulators you need.

If you don't want to do the maths then keep pasting accumulator+solar blueprints using the 0.84 ratio until accumulator charge stops dropping below 20% at night.

1. More accumulators will mean that the batteries won't fully charge by night.

That's wrong. If your accumulators are fully charged by the end of the day then you probably produce more power than you need, and the excess is simply lost (because you don't have accumulator capacity to store it). If you add more accumulators then they will fill up eventually and then sit around doing nothing. It's a waste of resources, but they don't do any harm.

[Warlord]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

That's wrong. If your accumulators are fully charged by the end of the day then you probably produce more power than you need, and the excess is simply lost (because you don't have accumulator capacity to store it). If you add more accumulators then they will fill up eventually and then sit around doing nothing. It's a waste of resources, but they don't do any harm.

I was still in my hypothetical situation where the person had a perfect, unchanging demand of power, and the exact power supplied by solar. I was trying (badly, I know) to explain how in this situation adding more accumulators won't help (or hurt) your actual power situation at night. Increasing the battery capacity will make it so the amount of excess power produced that COULD have filled the accumulators will now just barely not fill each of them by the end of the day.

[Zaflis]

If you have 0.84 ratio power setup that is stable (never out of power) it means there is at least a tiny bit excess. It means that if you have 1000 solar panels and 1 million accumulators, the accumulators would all eventually fill up. If however it wouldn't fill up, then you have too few solar panels to support even the 0.84.

[luggage]

I use a blueprint that fits exactly within the area of a substation power grid. Run x2 accumulators vertically above and below the substation, and another row of accumulators along the bottom of the power grid, and the rest of the space fills nicely with 16 solar panels. Not exactly the 0.84 ratio, but ... since everything falls neatly under the power grid of the substation, you can plonk the blueprints down next to each other and the substations will connect. Easy to add a little bit extra power rather than a much larger blueprint. Basically the accumulators in a 'T' shape, and the solar panels in the rest.

I also check the power production, and click to 1 min or 10 mins and look at the spike up to max at the beginning of the day and how long it lasts for during the day when it has fully charged the accumulators and drops back down to normal levels. once that starts creeping towards the evening, it is time to add more blueprints.

And as said before, once your base starts getting large or into a mega base and you have 1,000s of lasers, you need extra accumulators as if you suddenly get a mass alien attack, the lasers will chew through a lot of power all of a sudden, and you need to allow for that to prevent brownouts.