Best energy-production? mid/late game

[Swatti]

Tried ethanol with lumber. Problem is upkeeping the lumberyard. For some reason Pips wont plant in dirt-tile mod and manual upkeep via dupes seems to fail.
Petrol any better? Need manual labour so seems meh.

Wood generators, weak and need work. Same with coal, and coal is hard to manufacture.

Hydrogen is "easy" but relies on geysers, same with natural gas.

Steam turbines need pumps and tons of cooling. Not reliable and not that high output.

Solar gets bombarded with asteroids. Is the asteroid defense-leizoor-mod working?

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by Swatti:

Solar gets bombarded with asteroids. Is the asteroid defense-leizoor-mod working?

That is why you need to use bunker doors to protect it and close them when space scanners detect incoming meteors.

If done right solar power can become main power source. In my last colony during day all my power consumption was supplied with solar panels. During night or meteor shower base was powered by batteries that accumulated power surplus from solar panels. There were also petroleum generators as backup, supplied with petroleum produced automatically in oil boiler.

[Gamefever]

Hatch Ranching--->Coal
That is Early game power and food.
Automate it and ramp it up
Should have about 6 ranches and coal enough for 6 coal plants.

Then its off to Tame nearby vents, geysers and find volcano.

Tame easy stuff first...Then hepefully we find a volcano around.

Then dig down to oil biome.

Then build Volcano tamer for crude oil to petrol conversion and also some steam power, depends on Volcano but it can support 2 Steam Turbines...I think mine keeps a aquatuner in constant operation with some left over watts.

The main point of the volcano is the crude turning into petrol, so we can pump up as much as there is down there and constantly get a closer 1 to 1 conversion.

Now the thing is the normal route would mean that we made a net loss on power cause we use watts converting crude into petrol and also we get like 50% of the crude back as petrol...
Then there is the matter of the other costs from dealing with byproducts. But with the volcano tamer we just dump the crude in and get petrol and dont care about the byproducts till later.
Some of the crude becomes sour gas.

So Volcano Tamer is a mid game build,
EDIT
You only need Steel tiles on the floor and diamond temp shift plates...So you have to break the oil biome for these....Also plastic for Turbines comes from Drecko ranching or polymer press. No super coolant needed, since the crude conversion can take place right below turbines steam chamber which means heat of petrol is lost in energy conversion cause the heat there is transfered into steam...Still need gold amalgum for storage it comes out at about 100+C.

I dont know about ethanol.

I do get that in this game we are looking at how to get the products we need at the least cost and it seems like it just takes time and investigation to find better routes to getting what our colony needs.

[Planned Economy]

It really depends on your map type and seed.

I just started a new game on arboria. I left many wild trees alive and it made sense to start with ethanol as my first power source.

Usually I go for natural gas, but I haven't found a vent yet.

[Gamefever]

I think it goes kind of like this,

Early game ->Manual to Coal

Mid game->Vent, Geysor, Volcano Taming

Late game->Petrol and Natural Gas....Also likely H2 since a lot of players seem to go right to electrolyzer but in the early-mid game. (extra water from Petrol/NG ramps up here)

Space->Solar Panel, Sour Gas, Other

_______________________________

Though Im not sure about how to fit ethonal in there.

I know that you can get Hatches on other maps where coal is not readily available and that Hatches can easily make enough coal through ramping up ranching to support a lot of generators. I do get that not everyone would want to figure out ranching though.

Also you get some power from making O2 from Electrolyzer but since I basically use Terrariums for that I have no idea how much it actually is.

I know from pre-launch that Wood Burners were good CO2 producers that paired well with a farm of Oxyfern but still these dont produce enough power...Not like a room full of coal plants do.

[Gamefever]

Alright so time for a crazy idea.

Right now its not something I have done hence its an idea...

Alright so I have been doing a lot of cooling loops with the Aquatuner.

Sit the Aquatuner with a Pump in the Hotbox...With Crude Oil inside....
The Aquatuner heats the crude up to around 200-250C...The pump then moves the crude out to loop through water baths for Steam Turbines to create power.
The crude loops through those baths changing those to steam and it brings the temp back down as it passes and dumps back into the hot box to cool the Tuner.

Using the Aquatuner cause I want to get its cooling loop, but maybe there are other ways to create Steam after tapping geyser and volcano.

[Nick Naughty]

Dupe power :)

Try Rime 2022848247

It has two hydrogen and natural gas geysers straight down and slightly towards the right.

[cainboy]

Most stuff has been said already;
Pick energies based on the map you have
Add generators to your power production, not just swap over,
mid game/end game options.

Something I didn't see *(could just be because its how I see it), is prevention*** / not spending a lot.

Just like Heat being a problem, and one of the best solutions for dealing with heat isnt cooling it down, but to contain it, With power needs, while yes you could just build more generators, I find that having ways to reduce energy costs to perform X ends up being far more effecient in making sure you have enough power*.
Filters consume 120w per packet that goes through it (or filters? idrc); eats up a lot of power:
Alternative - use an element sensor and shut off valves to vastly reduce energy cost of filtering out X.

Power saved is like power earned.


That said: Planets with tons of water, you can use electrolyzers to just seperate hydrogen from oxygen for a net profit *(even more if you are clever and use energy free automation to keep the electrolyzers pumping ;) + then you can use Hydrogen to mid game cool vents for even more power before using that hydrogen for power.

Late game: if you can make a petrol boiler, it is super worth it. insanely. *(volcano tamed, rocket powered, or aquatuner loop heated)
With space materials you could just use the full conversion from crude oil to Natural gas for insane power and water production.
Solar roofs properly set up will basically fill your needs for free though *(Shine reactors work at anypoint, but really just break the early /mid + game for power needs so I avoid them)


Mods not mentioned since I dont play with mods.

[Gamefever]

@cainboy,

I forgot about Shine Bug reactor.

Works via solar panel...And this is a build you can begin putting together inside the early game with ranches since you need a lot of breeding shine bugs and of course Drecko's for poop and plastic to make the Solar Panels.

Its about 20 bugs forced into 1 tile via a conveyor chute.
Dont have to feed those bugs...So you just replace them from breeding chambers.

[GMC]

5 steam turbines running off heat from the magma layer produce 4250 W constantly without any upkeep. You need to use ~1kW of that for cooling (one aquatuner on ~75% duty cycle), although that will halve once you have super coolant.

That should be enough to see you through to the endgame, at which point you should also have solar power and maybe some natural gas vents.

My power generation goes hamster wheel -> coal -> steam -> solar, with gas where available. I don't use wood burners (farming lumber takes too much effort), petroleum generators (too much CO2 and heat), or hydrogen generators (save hydrogen for rockets).

Boiling oil to make gas is another option, but it's pretty awkward before the endgame (when you have super coolant and thermium available) and unnecessary once you're at that point.

[cainboy]

Originally posted by Gamefever:

@cainboy,

I forgot about Shine Bug reactor.

Its about 20 bugs forced into 1 tile via a conveyor chute.

More like 100 to power a cluster of 3 at max
but yeah, its a little broken not costing resources and just generates power infinitely >.>