Power generation dam

[R2]

There are a lot of ponds and waterfalls in the game, how to build a power generation dam to generate energy so as not to waste other resources to generate energy?

[Caver451]

Publicado originalmente por Nephizune!:

Your actually rather on point! This would be known as a Gravity dam...

I am under the impression that what you really need is pressure, which you get from the depth of water, not the "height" it falls. Please correct me if I am wrong in any of this...

Water simply falling over the top of a waterfall simply doesn't have the pressure to drive the huge turbines you need, unless you're just trying to grind grain or other relatively light tasks like that. You're simply dealing with the depth of the water at the lip of the waterfall; the actual height isn't relevant in that case. But if you pull your water from near the bottom of a reservoir over 100m deep, you have an enormous amount of pressure which is enough to spin those turbines to pieces unless you have a way to reduce the pressure and limit the rpms on those turbines. At 100m, you're dealing with 11 bars of absolute pressure, which is absolutely crushing!

I imagine if I only had a waterfall, and no reservoir, I would direct the water into a vertical pipe, and provided I had a high enough flow rate to keep the pipes constantly full, I could get much more useful power than if I just had my turbines at the top, but then any seasonal variation in the flow rate could starve my turbines or completely overwhelm them. If you're drawing from the bottom of a reservoir, you would have a fairly constant pressure to work with.

On a side note, while I would certainly consider hydroelectric power to be renewable, I don't really think of it as "green", in the sense that creating the reservoir devastates entire ecosystems and can even change weather patterns. Lake ♥♥♥♥, the reservoir for Hoover Dam, required the flooding of 247 square miles and destroyed the Colorado River Delta's ecosystem, buried important archaeological sites, at least one town, and caused numerous other ecological disasters over several ecosystems up and down the Colorado River. Hard to call any of that "green".

I'm actually not convinced that any form of power generation can ever really be considered truly "green". Even geothermal obliterates the local ecosystem.

Sorry for the inane ramble there. :)

[tdb]

Publicado originalmente por Caver451:

Water simply falling over the top of a waterfall simply doesn't have the pressure to drive the huge turbines you need, unless you're just trying to grind grain or other relatively light tasks like that. You're simply dealing with the depth of the water at the lip of the waterfall; the actual height isn't relevant in that case.

Technically the water falling from the top of the waterfall experiences the same change in potential energy as that traveling down a tall column of water. However a few things get in the way.

Firstly, air drag. Water going over a waterfall tends to separate into small droplets, which have high surface area compared to their mass and thus experience high amounts of drag. After falling less than 20 metres the droplets have reached their terminal velocity and won't accelerate any further. If the waterfall is of any significant height, most of the energy gets lost here. A large column of water avoids this loss since the water moves slower and there's less area through which it interacts with its surroundings.

Secondly, when the water hits the turbine blades, much of its energy is spent on splashing around. Some of the splashes will even hit the backside of the adjacent blade and cause an opposing force. If the turbine is full of water, there isn't any room for it to splash around so this loss is avoided as well.

[❤ Sly Succubus ❤]

Publicado originalmente por Caver451:

Publicado originalmente por Nephizune!:

Your actually rather on point! This would be known as a Gravity dam...

I am under the impression that what you really need is pressure, which you get from the depth of water, not the "height" it falls. Please correct me if I am wrong in any of this...

Water simply falling over the top of a waterfall simply doesn't have the pressure to drive the huge turbines you need, unless you're just trying to grind grain or other relatively light tasks like that. You're simply dealing with the depth of the water at the lip of the waterfall; the actual height isn't relevant in that case. But if you pull your water from near the bottom of a reservoir over 100m deep, you have an enormous amount of pressure which is enough to spin those turbines to pieces unless you have a way to reduce the pressure and limit the rpms on those turbines. At 100m, you're dealing with 11 bars of absolute pressure, which is absolutely crushing!

I imagine if I only had a waterfall, and no reservoir, I would direct the water into a vertical pipe, and provided I had a high enough flow rate to keep the pipes constantly full, I could get much more useful power than if I just had my turbines at the top, but then any seasonal variation in the flow rate could starve my turbines or completely overwhelm them. If you're drawing from the bottom of a reservoir, you would have a fairly constant pressure to work with.

On a side note, while I would certainly consider hydroelectric power to be renewable, I don't really think of it as "green", in the sense that creating the reservoir devastates entire ecosystems and can even change weather patterns. Lake ♥♥♥♥, the reservoir for Hoover Dam, required the flooding of 247 square miles and destroyed the Colorado River Delta's ecosystem, buried important archaeological sites, at least one town, and caused numerous other ecological disasters over several ecosystems up and down the Colorado River. Hard to call any of that "green".

I'm actually not convinced that any form of power generation can ever really be considered truly "green". Even geothermal obliterates the local ecosystem.

Sorry for the inane ramble there. :)

Valid points, no I get what your saying here, I'm not a master on this stuff but yes pressure is rather huge in these facilities.

For the record, Hydroelectric power is deemed Renewable but is not Green energy, because of this wonderful little exploit called Waste Water dams, if you dont know what those are, their dams that are used to hold waste water from mining facilities, which is so far from green that it could classify hydrodams nearly as bad as nuclear power in terms of waste products, one dam in Africa burst that was designed for waste water: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Bento_Rodrigues%2C_Mariana%2C_Minas_Gerais_%2822828956680%29.jpg Lets just say, it was only a few feet tall, but has rendered flooded areas completely toxic and uninhabitable due to copper, iron and nickle waste.

In the grand total things that are green, those would be Solar, Wind and Geothermal only, this is not to be confused with renewable (despite them both often being tossed in the same truck) because in this case, Nuclear power is not green (at least not in the sense of what it does, Idk if we count radioactive glowing people tho yet) but it is renewable because in the real world, Uranium waste is reprocessed into Plutonium, which is then further refined down into MOX fuel.

Thing is MOX is has such a short half life that it can be slightly useless, its fuel life if not used is so short that transporting it from the reactor, to the facility and back could render the fuel inert but in weapons MOX is also extremely lethal to (its often deemed a surplus material in nuclear weapons manufacturing)

Difference between Green and Renewable is the part that Green does not require anything besides nature just handing over power, this is why the idea of a Dyson sphere is ever growing in the space agencies in terms of a dyson swarm, harnessing the power of the sun itself is nothing new, but finding new ways to do so via solar power would be a godsend especially when a dyson swarm is just tons of honeycomb shaped mirrors that are solar panels, wind is..well wind, I'm sure we all know how wind works by now and geothermal is another pressure type power generator

While Hydro and Nuclear are deemed as "green" their not, their 100% renewable yes, but their not green due to them having a byproduct akin to coal and fuel power plants, however I will note biofuel is not as bad as this game makes it out to be, hell the United Kings largest power production facility, the Drax Power Plant, is entire Biofuel and puts out nearly 4k MW, which is 1,500 more power then the nuclear power plant in game current puts out.

Which..is funny, imagine that there are green facilities that do indeed put out more power and we deem them as tier 1, but in the real world they do put out more power

Examples like the Drax is Boifuel, The Geysers in the United States is Geothermal with 1,590 MW, Gansu Wind Farm is a windfarm in China that puts out 8k MW's (with a planned future of 20k MW)

Which it is a further funny...the 7 largest power production facilities on earth (in terms of out put) are all hydropower dams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations - which btw if you scroll down, throughout human history, the largest power producer for us has always been hydro, while yes the Three Gorges took the top in 2007, prior was the Itaipu Dam, before it was the Guri Dam, then the Grand Coulee Dam and so on, through out humanities time on this planet its a bit funny that our largest producer in power, is dams, even with nuclear's birth in the late world war 2 era, Sir Adam Beck, Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam from 1924 to 1959 put out more power then even nuclear, coal and fuel power plants across the US

[Die Hand Gottes]

If what should come it will only be a simplification as in this mod and rather less places where you can build a realistic solution does not come into play if what should come at all.
By the way, I also have something here to simulate a dam.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3020352881

[R2]

Publicado originalmente por Die Hand Gottes:

If what should come it will only be a simplification as in this mod and rather less places where you can build a realistic solution does not come into play if what should come at all.
By the way, I also have something here to simulate a dam.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3020352881

Look cool, thank everyone for answer.
as I understand it, the reason for the absence of green energy sources is that they do not consume resources like everything else. Then it would be possible to make the dam consume rotors, rubber for moisture insulation and much more.

[tdb]

Dams have a limited number of locations to build them, which is enough of a limitation. It's the same with geothermal, which does not consume any resources either. What the devs don't want is energy production with no limitations, like solar and wind.

[Die Hand Gottes]

exactly so wind power and solar is unfortunately out
I also believe that something like hydroelectric power is also no longer coming because they care more about the completion of the game, which I also understand.

[tdb]

Yeah, at this point hydro would be just for flavor and in no way critical for completing the game. Maybe it'll be added in a later expansion though, if it's too complex for 1.0.

[Die Hand Gottes]

Just be surprised and accept what the developers want and what not.
they go anyway on many wishes and for me already a little too much.

[Caver451]

Publicado originalmente por tdb:

Dams have a limited number of locations to build them, which is enough of a limitation. It's the same with geothermal, which does not consume any resources either. What the devs don't want is energy production with no limitations, like solar and wind.

I believe this is only part of the reason for the omission. I feel the bigger issue for the developers is, by implementing those power generation options, you would no longer be forced to make the hard decisions about how many resources should be allocated for power generation vs manufacturing.

Coal is a good starting power, but when you start making steel, you need to figure out how much of that coal you want to use for power vs steel production. Fuel generators are a great next step, but if you use your oil for power, you can't make as much plastic or rubber.

Nuclear feels like it is breaking that cycle, but the setup and consumption of waste is very complicated and takes enormous amount of every other resource you would probably prefer to dedicate to more "useful" manufacturing.