Why is my grid shutting down when I put power shards in coal plants?

[Mr Fantastic]

Im very confused, even a closed circuit with power plants with enough biomass as a secondary source is shutting down.

Setup:
4 power plants at 250%
2 pumps at 100%
3 biomass reactors at 100%

[Wolfgang]

Very likely because your coal power plants aren't getting enough water (and maybe not enough coal too). A coal power plant needs 45m³/min water which with 4 makes 180m³/min @100%. You overclocking them to 250% means they need 2.5 times that much so 450m³/min in sum. But two water extractors at 100% only provide 240m³/min.
Meaning your coal power plants are running out of water, going idle and your power demand exceeds your power capacity which is tripping the fuse.

[mackster]

If you look at a power pole, or at the generators, it will show stats. The total power the grid has, the total currently being used and, often missed, the total power requirement of everything connected, regardless if its in use or not.

You have to make sure your overall capacity is higher than the potential power drain

[Mr Fantastic]

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Very likely because your coal power plants aren't getting enough water (and maybe not enough coal too). A coal power plant needs 45m³/min water which with 4 makes 180m³/min @100%. You overclocking them to 250% means they need 2.5 times that much so 450m³/min in sum. But two water extractors at 100% only provide 240m³/min.
Meaning your coal power plants are running out of water, going idle and your power demand exceeds your power capacity which is tripping the fuse.

Even if they get only half the water they need, they should still produce half the energy no?

I had the pumps at 200% but put them to 100 since they consume a lot of energy.

[Suzaku]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Very likely because your coal power plants aren't getting enough water (and maybe not enough coal too). A coal power plant needs 45m³/min water which with 4 makes 180m³/min @100%. You overclocking them to 250% means they need 2.5 times that much so 450m³/min in sum. But two water extractors at 100% only provide 240m³/min.
Meaning your coal power plants are running out of water, going idle and your power demand exceeds your power capacity which is tripping the fuse.

Even if they get only half the water they need, they should still produce half the energy no?

I had the pumps at 200% but put them to 100 since they consume a lot of energy.

No. Generators are either on or off; running at full power or not at all. If you don't supply them with enough resources, they simply don't run.

The exception is biomass burners, as those scale their resource consumption based on power demands.

[Wolfgang]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Very likely because your coal power plants aren't getting enough water (and maybe not enough coal too). A coal power plant needs 45m³/min water which with 4 makes 180m³/min @100%. You overclocking them to 250% means they need 2.5 times that much so 450m³/min in sum. But two water extractors at 100% only provide 240m³/min.
Meaning your coal power plants are running out of water, going idle and your power demand exceeds your power capacity which is tripping the fuse.

Even if they get only half the water they need, they should still produce half the energy no?

I had the pumps at 200% but put them to 100 since they consume a lot of energy.

No, they won't do that. If the numbers don't match (or are more than required) then the plant will go idle providing no power at all.
With your setup you can power the 4 coal plants @ 100% with 2 pumps @ 100% just fine (and need 60 coal/min in sum).

[Mr Fantastic]

I found a few bottlenecks since I'm using tier 1 stuff only and corrected them.

A mine with a basic conveyor can only feed 60 coal, which is enough for 2 power plants at 200% and 1 pump at 150% gives the needed 180m3 water. Good cheap setup.

4 plants doing 600MW should be enough for a while.

Can we build batteries later on to store the excess?

[Suzaku]

Yes, you can unlock batteries.

[SourHammer]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

I found a few bottlenecks since I'm using tier 1 stuff only and corrected them.

A mine with a basic conveyor can only feed 60 coal, which is enough for 2 power plants at 200% and 1 pump at 150% gives the needed 180m3 water. Good cheap setup.

4 plants doing 600MW should be enough for a while.

Can we build batteries later on to store the excess?

There are some power buffers later in the game you can unlock. Each one charges to 100mwh and can supply 100mw for an hour. Though storing power is not really the intended use, they are more for if you happen excede your power production they can help boost the power for an hour. Like if you hook up too many machines and draw 100 mw more than your making, the buffer will keep the fuse from blowing for an hour.

[Wolfgang]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

I found a few bottlenecks since I'm using tier 1 stuff only and corrected them.

A mine with a basic conveyor can only feed 60 coal, which is enough for 2 power plants at 200% and 1 pump at 150% gives the needed 180m3 water. Good cheap setup.

4 plants doing 600MW should be enough for a while.

Can we build batteries later on to store the excess?

Yes, you will unlock them later and are called "Power Storage". They can each hold 100MWh of power and will only charge using excess power that is not generated by biomass burners. Their discharge speed is unlimited and I personally recommend to have enough that your factory can run for about 1 hour only on them.
They are kinda pricy to build but can save your grid if the buffer is enough for you to notice you use them and can fix the issue in time.

[Mister Fabulous]

I have a correction. Power storage takes one hour to charge from empty if there is sufficient excess power. They will consume up to 1.6_ MW per minute, or less as it will be spread out evenly if you have a whole bunch of batteries and not enough excess.

They will discharge as fast as needed to meet demand. If you have one fully charged battery and 1000 MW deficiency it will be able to provide power for 6 minutes and empty the battery.

Also, biomass burners do not charge power storage.

[Illuminia]

^ What they said.

Basically, if any machine doesn't have the correct amount of input materials, it stops and waits until it does. So this means both Coal & Water - if there's not enough to consume, it stops.
So if your water flow is too low for a Coal burner, it will sit and wait until there's enough water in it's internal tank to to run for "burn 1 unit of coal"....

Power Shards basically increase the speed of a machine - including amount both coal of water it uses per minute. Water takes some time to "flow" so even if you are producing exactly enough water, there is some time delay before it reaches the generator's input tank.
... also slows down some if going uphill, and can eventually stop if it's too steep a climb.

To run constantly at 100% speed, it needs a constant supply of at least 45m3 of water each minute. (Counting that water doesn't instantly get added into a machine's internal tank - you can actually watch it empty/fill in the bottom-left of the generator's UI sometimes.)

Pipe's also have a flow rate max limit - 300m3 for the basic Mk1 starter pipes; so there is a hard limit on how many machines you can have on the same pipeline before the further ones only get a trickle or starve.

All of that added together means it's a bit more challenging to overclock anything dealing with liquids.

You can do 8 Coal Generators + 3 Water Extractors at 100%, on a single Coal (Pure) deposit Mk1 miner, .... but it's not an intuitive build.

[Die Hand Gottes]

This is the effort to operate 16 coal-fired power plants with 250% overclocking and for update 7 two water pumps have been added because there has also changed a lot but they now produce in U7 also much more power in the middle are two 600 pipes and another 600 pipe goes to the middle to grant the flow.
For the coal, a MK5 conveyor belt is the minimum you need if you build more power plants, a MK5 belt is no longer enough.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2876262246

Even more brutal are overclocked nuclear power plants to supply with water

[mackster]

I have a 30 coal generator, all overclocked to 200%. They are fed by 300pm pipes with the water generators completely overclocked to achieve 300pm each. Finally, I have compacted coal, which is created next to the power plant, as this obviously burns longer than normal coal.

My highest belt is a MK4.

I get 4.5GW from this. No issues with water, there are two pumps on them as they are in the lake in the mountain top in the Rocky Desert. There is no wavering of the power either. Quite happy with my setup there.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904889831
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904889852
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904889892
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904891110