Power transformer / Prioritizing between steam turbines and engines

[Danub]

I was using an SR latch to set my old steam engines on backup after setting up nuclear power. While that works just right when using it as backup for solar panels, with steam turbines the load gets split between the engines and turbines, wasting nuclear fuel while the backup is connected to the grid.
I just thought of a different setup for the backup power. Instead of connecting it to the main grid directly, I use what is essentially a power transformer, by having two separate power grids cover the same accumulators:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2432244153

The substations are connected to two grids. The upper line of substations is connected to the backup grid and the lower one to the main grid. The connections between the two lines are removed maintaining grid isolation.
When power demand exceeds what the nuclear setup can deliver, the accumulators start discharging while being charged by the backup grid at the same time, transferring power without the load being split anymore. The steam turbines from the nuclear setup will keep working at full capacity all the time.

You need to build enough accumulators to match the output of the backup setup though. 3 accumulators per steam engine to have full throughput. You can build more than that to handle spikes in load going over what the combined power generation can handle, for a limited time.

I'm sure this is no novelty and suspect might even be a standard setup, though I haven't noticed (not that I inspected nuclear setups much) in multiplayer. Either way, I believe some people should still find this setup useful.

[Warlord]

I'm not sure where you had this SR Latch. If you use the latch properly, then you have the latch turn on when accumulator percentage drops below a certain point, right? What is the latch on: nuclear power, steam power, or both?

By the sound of it, you have:
-Nuclear: Always on.
-Solar: Being the way solar always is.
-Boilers: Behind SR Latch.

If this is the case, then you are already fine. If your solar and nuclear are insufficient enough that accumulators drop below a certain percentage, your latch ought to kick in and turn on boilers. Then, assuming all 3 power sources are sufficient to power your base AND charge accumulators, the accumulators start charging. At this point, all 3 power sources are running at 100% to fill the accumulators. At a certain high percentage, the SR Latch should kick in and disable boilers.

With an SR Latch on boilers, boilers will never be on if their power isn't 100% needed. If their power is 100% needed, then so is nuclear.

[Danub]

I am not using solar panels and this setup is intended to only work with steam turbines for main power supply and steam engines for backup power.
I don't think setup has any use if you're using solar panels. The point is to maintain nuclear power plant efficiency when steam boilers backup kicks if you're not using solars.

[The_Mell]

Ironically your setup using a bunch of accumulators is inefficient in my opinion.
Instead of using stored power your setup starts burner backup immediately. In a situation with demand around max output of nuclear power you burn & pollute while accumulators could compensate between times of shortage & excess.

The only advantage i see is time to brownout if your backup isn't enough because it starts at "< 100%" instead of "< x%" - but this is a situation to be avoided at all.
With a staged burner backup setup you could sound an alarm if your last backup fires up and maybe use this as an indicator to invest into more power production before you actually come into a problematic situation.

So i'm in favor for the good old charge controlled water pump for backup power - can be done with 1 cable & works just fine. Simple things can be really good things.

Still i kinda like your setup just because it works & shows what can be done. Somehow the beauty of engineering and the question "Why not?"

[Danub]

Actually, you can combine both solutions, now that I think about it. You have a separate accumulator field for buffering energy from your nuclear power plants and charge control a power shutoff between the 'power transformer' and the main grid. The problem here wasn't that backup starts at 100% charge on the transformer, just that it wasn't supposed to buffer energy, just transfer it between grids instead.
But yea, I agree on it being more interesting than useful :)

On more thought, what this allows is prioritizing between steam engines and steam turbines, since you can use them both ways, though with how high power output from nuclear plants is, you'd need quite a few of them to use nuclear power as lower priority.

[knighttemplar1960]

Why not just shunt unused steam from the nuclear plant(s) into storage tanks when power demand is <100% and set up a back up set of turbines to use it when you exceed 100% power demand? A single storage tank of 500 degree steam holds as much power as 480 accumulators.

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Danub:

I am not using solar panels and this setup is intended to only work with steam turbines for main power supply and steam engines for backup power.
I don't think setup has any use if you're using solar panels. The point is to maintain nuclear power plant efficiency when steam boilers backup kicks if you're not using solars.

Ok, so... I guess what you are expecting is that - under average/normal load - nuclear isn't sufficient to power your base? In which case you have a large boiler setup off to the side that you want to have only run "just enough" to supplement nuclear without sharing the load. So you fully expect this power share system to be running constantly, with boilers running at under 100% load, so nuclear is always at 100%. Hm.

Ok, I can kind of see a value in this then. It does look very nice too.

As an alternative, I think I would have built twice the turbines with a few steam tanks inbetween the two sets of turbines, and set up an SR Latch on the steam. If the power is low on an accumulator bank I set up, turn on steam. Power is shared by the two power sources, leading the turbines to run less often. But as their steam is consumed slower than normal, this allows the excess steam produced by exchangers to build up in the tanks and start flowing into additional turbines, further lowering how much boilers need to run to power things. Since there is constant demand (storage and more turbines) for the heat exchangers, they should utilize nuclear fuel without wasting any. Once accumulators get high enough to shut off, you should have an excess of steam built up from the exchangers. It should then be used up in the excess turbines to allow nuclear to power above normal capacity for some time before running out, returning your nuclear power output to normal levels. If this is insufficient to power your base, accumulators kick in again, and the process starts over.

Edit: All of this is a long explanation for what KnightTemplar ninja'd on me. :D

[Nailfoot]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Why not just shunt unused steam from the nuclear plant(s) into storage tanks when power demand is <100% and set up a back up set of turbines to use it when you exceed 100% power demand? A single storage tank of 500 degree steam holds as much power as 480 accumulators.

This would be my suggestion, too. Then, you can hook a wire to the inserters that remove spent fuel rods from the reactors. Hook that wire to the steam tanks, When steam drops low, then the removal of spent fuel rods can occur.

THEN hook the inserter that is removing the spent rods to the inserter that is supplying fuel. Have it "read hand contents". When it is holding a spent fuel rod, enable the supplying inserter, and override it to only hold one item.

Its hard to explain but it will look like this:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2432593369

If you do this correctly, you will never waste another fuel rod. Also, your reactors will likely sit empty of fuel for a good portion of their life. That's not an issue.

[Purpleganja]

I like this trick of shared accumulators that allows to do more things without logic wires.
I was thinkering about a no logic wire megabase just for fun and one thing that didn't have a good solution yet was nuclear fuel wasting (I was doing some convoluted fuel denial system involving belt clogging).
This trick might help in some way. Thanks!

[Danub]

Warlord got the gist of what I was trying to achieve. Once I placed the first nuclear reactors I switch the boilers + steam engines that had powered my factory till that point to a backup system. Buffering the nuclear power output and otherwise making an efficient nuclear power setup is beyond the scope of what this aimed to achieve. Just thought it interesting that you can transfer power between grids like this and prevent sharing load between different power generation setups. Got to admit that the title of the thread is misleading though. I'm updating it to something more relevant.

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Danub:

Warlord got the gist of what I was trying to achieve. Once I placed the first nuclear reactors I switch the boilers + steam engines that had powered my factory till that point to a backup system. Buffering the nuclear power output and otherwise making an efficient nuclear power setup is beyond the scope of what this aimed to achieve. Just thought it interesting that you can transfer power between grids like this and prevent sharing load between different power generation setups. Got to admit that the title of the thread is misleading though. I'm updating it to something more relevant.

I apologize, I probably kicked this off from a "look at this cool thing you can do" thread into a "Why are you doing that, do this?" thread. I like seeing things people come up with, but I just have a habit of offering suggestions or alternate options.

I certainly did learn something from your example though. I had not tried charging an accumulator with one network while also having it discharge into a main network. I'm curious now to see whether the accums flicker between charging and not, or just do a soft "charging" glow all the time.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Danub:

Warlord got the gist of what I was trying to achieve. Once I placed the first nuclear reactors I switch the boilers + steam engines that had powered my factory till that point to a backup system. Buffering the nuclear power output and otherwise making an efficient nuclear power setup is beyond the scope of what this aimed to achieve. Just thought it interesting that you can transfer power between grids like this and prevent sharing load between different power generation setups. Got to admit that the title of the thread is misleading though. I'm updating it to something more relevant.

I do something similar. I have steam engines and buffered boilers that are isolated from the rest of the power grid. Their only job is to provide power to coal miners that supply themselves and the mining and processing of uranium so that even if I have a brown out start I have sufficient fuel and power to keep the nuclear fuel coming. This only rarely kicks in and it usually happens when I need to build another nuclear plant. I have a speaker alarm system set up that goes off when the boiler set up starts running. That tells me that its time to build another nuclear plant or that its time to mine another patch of uranium and the buffered fuel gives me enough time to do either one that is required before the base completely loses power.

The only time I have power spikes is when I'm building something large and many machines that were off turn on. My defenses are mostly flame thrower turrets and gun turrets with lasers only at the corners of the base where I only get 50% of the over lapping fire from straight wall sections. Late game I have artillery interspersed so that I never get large waves of biters that could over run my defenses. As soon as a nest is in range it gets taken out. The only time that changes is when I complete an artillery range increase research. Even then its minimal.

[Nailfoot]

Originally posted by Danub:

Warlord got the gist of what I was trying to achieve. Once I placed the first nuclear reactors I switch the boilers + steam engines that had powered my factory till that point to a backup system. Buffering the nuclear power output and otherwise making an efficient nuclear power setup is beyond the scope of what this aimed to achieve. Just thought it interesting that you can transfer power between grids like this and prevent sharing load between different power generation setups. Got to admit that the title of the thread is misleading though. I'm updating it to something more relevant.

Oops. I totally missed the "This is another way to do this." point.

And I love finding other ways to do things.

[Danub]

Originally posted by Warlord:

Originally posted by Danub:

Warlord got the gist of what I was trying to achieve. Once I placed the first nuclear reactors I switch the boilers + steam engines that had powered my factory till that point to a backup system. Buffering the nuclear power output and otherwise making an efficient nuclear power setup is beyond the scope of what this aimed to achieve. Just thought it interesting that you can transfer power between grids like this and prevent sharing load between different power generation setups. Got to admit that the title of the thread is misleading though. I'm updating it to something more relevant.

I apologize, I probably kicked this off from a "look at this cool thing you can do" thread into a "Why are you doing that, do this?" thread. I like seeing things people come up with, but I just have a habit of offering suggestions or alternate options.

I certainly did learn something from your example though. I had not tried charging an accumulator with one network while also having it discharge into a main network. I'm curious now to see whether the accums flicker between charging and not, or just do a soft "charging" glow all the time.

There's no flicker. I think the charge and discharge happen in the same update so the state change ends up being the difference between load and production ending up in a smooth discharge or no change if they're matched.

[Danub]

And here's a scenario where this setup actually comes quite in handy:
You've at the point where all your power comes from all of the steam engines you kept building since starting the game and you've just researched nuclear power. You're getting maybe 100-200 MW from the steam engines and you want to cut down on the fuel consumption. So you build 1-2 nuclear reactors and plop them down for a quick and dirty solution and go back to focusing on whatever you were doing. Your few nuclear reactors would produce less power than demanded so you don't bother with buffering energy since there wouldn't be any leftover to store. But both of your power producer setups are on the same grid and share the load. This is where the power transformer comes in handy. It's fast and easy to build and gets all the juice out of your nuclear reactors while your steam engines will only provide the difference needed for full demand satisfaction. It pretty much becomes obsolete after you properly expand your nuclear power setup, but depending on your play style, it can be quite useful. This is pretty much the scenario i was finding myself in when I came up with the idea.

[Nailfoot]

Originally posted by Danub:

.... This is where the power transformer comes in handy. It's fast and easy to build and gets all the juice out of your nuclear reactors while your steam engines will only provide the difference needed for full demand satisfaction. ......

I like this. You could use it as a visual way to check your power without clicking a power pole. Are the coal-fired boilers running? Then nuclear cannot keep up by itself.

Without your power transformer, coal-fired boilers run all of the time, unless solar is 100% providing everything you need.