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and no the developers are against green energy.
Possibly times hydroelectric power plants but only in limited numbers that was not completely ruled out but would not rely on it.
CSS has been very vocal about what -fits- the game and not, but that has nothing to do with whether or not they're against it or not.. But yes, they may or may not look into hydroelectric in the future.
and if we start again here with wind power and solar, the thread is white, all others in this direction quickly disappeared to the other thread, which is also locked.
So no way wind and solar in hydro I think Snutt said he could imagine but I don't think so either.
But if you want that, you should have a look at the mod, which I had already tested but discarded because I didn't need it and brought a lot of unnecessary stuff with me.
That makes them like geothermal generators.
Yes they said no to green energy but waterfalls is not an absolute no.
Unlimited green energy isn't fine. It may be the path to the future in real life, but in game it doesn't play well. Instead of trying out new production chains and facing new logistic obstacles, the solar/wind meta is to literally pave the map and plant huge fields of them. It's very grindy/redundant gameplay and the end result is a base that looks like a parking lot.
I myself hesitated for a long time to use nuclear power and relied more on fuel generators.
Nuclear power needs a huge logistics also in the waste management with green energy most will not get involved.
You say that like it isn't literally how coal, oil and nuclear already play out in this game. The 'meta' for coal plants is to pick a nice lake that's near some coal nodes, pave over the top of it and put your generators there with water collectors interspersed.
Oil is no different (since diluted fuel is the 'ultimate' way to squeeze as much power out of your oil nodes as possible, and that requires a large processing area that needs to be near water... oh look, we're paving over lakes again); and nuclear demands that you make space for it (which means either a giant floating platform, a giant floating platform underground, or else transport everything to the nearest flat plains/dunes that you can pave over... also you want it to be in a big open area and have water access for cooling; looks like we're back to those lakes at the edge of the world!) Whichever way you go, there's a lot of boring copy-and-paste building. The internal logic of the recipes and the map layout means that the same strategy ALWAYS becomes the most sensible one at large scale.
Personally, if I could drop a couple of solar collectors/windmills and a battery or two at each outpost, I'd be much more inclined to spread out and build standalone outposts. Even if that wasn't the actual power source for the main production of the outpost, it would allow me to keep the critical part of the outpost (player transport + anything like radar that I'll need for planning or monitoring) running so that I can easily get there and fix/update things as needed.
We effectively have unlimited energy in the game already, it's just locked behind a lot of copy/paste chores. There is a theoretical limit from the number of nodes (I suspect that water is actually your limiting resource; since it's used in the 'ultimate version' of all forms of power beyond biomass in some way or another), but in practice you only start even thinking about that theoretical limit if you're trying to use the entire node volume of the map -- long after you've completed the space elevator and any of the sensible projects; at that point you're just building for the sake of building.
And the thing about geothermal plants is that they're already a waste of time. For the effort it takes to build one, you could just build another oil/coal plant nearby; especially since the geothermal plants all happen to be relatively close to one of those other sources of power anyway. They're quite redundant by the point you unlock them. Hydroelectric dams/mini-turbines would only be worth building if they had a significant power production and/or are able to be built in places where other power sources aren't convenient nearby... and that second part is also a very thin argument given that we can just build power poles anywhere and connect to that massive generator plant on the other side of the map.
What would have been more interesting would be if power lines had a maximum amperage, so they can only supply so many machines and so much electricity moving through on a single grid. Then things like high-power transmission lines would have a place; and it would also make more sense to take advantage of local power sources rather than spending a lot of time and materials to carry power all the way across the map (especially if you factor in some loss when the power goes through transformers to step it down from the main HV/HA line to the local grid that machines run on.) And the best part: that would solve the "just build infinite solar/wind farms" issue too; because you'd have to account for the changing amperage of what's coming through those lines -- not only the "sometimes the wind stops", but also the "sometimes the wind is too strong (or the sun shines so strongly -- it's an alien planet, maybe we frequent mini get solar flares!), and the fuse blows so that the increased energy doesn't melt all the power lines." You'd have to have each solar/wind generator hooked up to batteries which then output to the grid (so the batteries are doubling as transformers), meaning that a small solar farm to output the equivalent power of a coal plant becomes significantly more expensive to build than the single coal plant + water extractor it's replacing. And we already have silica as a tier 4 resource; so that means that by the time you have access to solar panels you also already have access to a cheaper and more reliable power method -- solar becomes useful for when there's no coal/water nearby (this is, of course, before you have oil as well), or you want to save the local coal for making steel/gunpowder.
Move geothermal energy down to tier 1 (make it cheap, easy and set-and-forget, but strictly limited by the number of geothermal spots -- I would also say add more spots but make them much less powerful, to make it more of a T1 energy source), add the amperage limits to power lines + higher tiers of power lines to handle higher loads, and ditch the biomass power altogether (the HUB now runs off of a solar/wind generator and internal batteries, or even better it drills down to tap into the planet's upper mantle for geothermal energy); and we'd have a much more fun and interesting early-game power management experience. And later on we could have hydroelectric dams as late-game versions of geothermal, where the dam is also useful as a big water source (multiple fluid outputs) and you can drain wastewater back into the dam as well to output to the environment, allowing it to serve as a sink for alumina and nuclear processing byproduct water. At that point, the dam becomes interesting as a megaproject rather than as a power generator; it's a big thing that you can build which has a bunch of small benefits associated with it. It could even provide a way to filter the outflowing water to catch alluvial runoff (silica, goldcaterium, maybe the occasional Alien Protein), and now if you're also pumping in water that's come from an alumina plant it could have a very small reclamation rate on alumina product that would otherwise be lost in the normal washing process.
That would be a fun and interesting progression through power -- you're not just starting with a ♥♥♥♥ source and always building more more MORE any playing catch-up; but thinking about the locally accessible resources and the trade-offs between using the smaller local source/s or running a HV line to your big generator plant in the next biome over.
https://cdn.britannica.com/58/197258-050-96BA3983/Three-Gorges-Dam-city-province-Yangtze-River.jpg
This is an image of it, while it looks small, take not that the red cranes on the dam are the same ones you see in shipyards that load large cargo ships with their cargo, and even behind the Three Gorges dam are 4 more dams, the Wudongde Dam, the Baihetan Dam, the Xiluodu Dam and the Xiangjiaba Dam, which keep in mind that these dams require water basins which comes down to the hugest issue that this game does not have.
Dynamic water flow, without that the water would not change level and with how dams are designed to work, with a flood basin, there's no real way to put a dam in the game till we can flood areas of the map with water, and given the water in game is little more then a 'transition' device (literally given that the water is more of just semi-solid ground at best) I dont know if they'll put it in the game, because dynamic fluids have quite the sizable impact on most peoples PC's, its why alot of games dont have it unless their designed to be some sort of sandbox to begin with
Not the "developers are making some anti-green energy stance" argument again. Sigh.
If your biggest problem with the game's narrative, is that you're not able to use "green" energy to power the factories you are building on someone else's planet for the purpose of stealing their resources and shipping them off planet, then I sincerely pray for our future.
yet I can read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4LlorYbVV0
and the reasons have already been explained here why they don't want it.
Can also be the moderator also closes this thread because the topic is already chewed 100 times through
watch the video and take it.
And this is one of the two major visual challenges in implementing dam-based hydroelectric power in the game. To look realistic an artificial lake would have to form behind the dam, and that's pretty hard to add at this point. There's a very limited number of locations in the game where such a thing would be possible without covering the meticulously designed scenery and probably submerging some important locations like crash sites.
The other challenge is the visual design of the dam itself. In the real world each dam is uniquely designed for its location. In a game it might be possible to design one segment of a dam and require that the player places enough of those to cover the entire width of the river, but I'm not sure how good that would end up looking, especially at the edges.
Interestingly, Cities: Skylines has dam-based hydroelectric power with some form of fluid dynamics, but that game has a clearly defined river with fairly steep banks and known width. It was clearly accounted for from early stages of development, unlike Satisfactory which so far has very limited interactions with water.
There is also a newer dam prototype system called Tide Dams, where the dam shutsdown at high tides near oceans and reopens at low tide and uses the newly formed body of water to create power, however tidal dams are very much in their early stages and are not as practical as they only work half the time..the other half their just offline
Edit: Sorry I was just waking up so I re-read the question fully now heh. In theory yes we can also use the height to limit water intake and use the speed of droplets to turn the turbines as well, dams usually have a fixed limit at what they can spin at, their a more open verison of say, a coal power plant, where the burned coal is used to boil water which turns into steam and spins the turbine, just in this situation their using actual water.
Still with my prior example it works to, the three gorges has to use penstocks to start the speed for the water going which leads to a run of the river dam, these dams are often much closer to the ground and their run-offs are usually just steep hillsides ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/Castaic_Power_Plant_Front.jpg/1280px-Castaic_Power_Plant_Front.jpg ) Which I'll provide a link for here, this is a flood basin which has its own power generation zone such as the three gorges which compared to this one ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Hoovernewbridge.jpg ) Uses the two giant syphon towers (ya those are not just towers you can stand form, they intake water to) and drop it from a high point to a lower point where penstocks built inside the mountainsides dump the water into the lower river (which is out of camera focus) thus making a gravity dam outright built in a canyon.
The biggest thing here to note is most, if not all gravity dams are built into canyons or rivers, small to large rivers (such in the United States for the Missoui's Big Bend Dam) which are entirely designed around controlling flood wars, they may also generate tiny bits of power but their task is flood control first, power second, but other dams are power first and flood control second such as the Hoover dam, in this case some dams are designed outright to prevent the flooding of areas and later had power generation zones added, which is why run of the river dams were made later on then gravity dams, because these smaller dam systems run the water off through a artificial outlet then the river itself.
Taking in the idea of a waterfall would work I imagine if the dam was built at the mouth of the water fall (IE above on the hillside such as in the North Eastern desert where the water on the top of the mountain runs off into the oasis below, the dam would be on the top side of the mountain) as this allows the flood basin to be made up there, otherwise there's no real function of a waterfall dam, which I do believe are different subject entirely because I heard that waterfall dams are a thing but their functions are apparently vastly different then that of hydrodams in the part that they dont have any basin, idk how they work personally but I heard a few prototypes do exist, one even in the South American jungles were one is built just below the run off a short mountain river, idk anything more on it because I dont think much either came of it or people didnt check up on it.
2nd Edit (Sorry lol)
https://steamcommunity.com/id/Whodundidthehookascota/screenshot/2002465601778889877/ This would work as a waterfall dam, as you can see its built at the top of the mountain and uses the existing waterfall behind to make power (this is largely just a design I did for fun but still) and the lake behind it that exists and is constantly refilled would work but..this is the only one I've found in the game that does this ( https://steamcommunity.com/id/Whodundidthehookascota/screenshot/2002465601778898905/ )