electrical batteries

[ratita]

the creators will add some sort of electric storage?

[meraco]

Im surprised this wasn't built into the solar plant and wind turbines.

At some point the sun sets, the wind stops...

[Chip Chipperson]

These "green" energies are not the best for all situations, especially in that era. Storage of electrical charge is and was prohibitively expensive, takes incredible amounts of space, and has a huge ecological impact.

[Konrad]

How realistic is it to expect electrical storage from the time period of the game? I'm not opposed to the concept, but I don't think it was a wide spread idea at the time. Unless you think of hydro, where the bassins act as a battery of sorts? But huge batteryfarms? In the 1960s? I'm skeptical.

[Duke Flapjack]

I mean, even nowadays large scale electrical storage doesn't really exist...

[Cuirassier]

That's just "green" energy for you lol

[ratita]

Originally posted by Chip Chipperson:

%hese "green" energies are not the best for all situations, especially in that era. Storage of electrical charge is and was prohibitively expensive, takes incredible amounts of space, and has a huge ecological impact.

[ratita]

so the electric batteries are higly imposible i think

[Duke Flapjack]

Originally posted by Der Kürassier:

That's just "green" energy for you lol

This IS exactly the underlying problem with green energy: it's neither 100% reliable nor usable everywhere. At present (with certain rather large exceptions such as large desert-based solar arrays or tidal generators) it's really only great at being an "edge" supply, meaning a electricity supply that can be brought online or dropped offline quickly to support more constant, but slow coal/oil/nuclear/geo electrical suppliers. Really, IRL only on a very very small scale is energy storage viable.

[tjoppen]

Bumping because I had this exact same idea the other day. Currently over/underproduction has to be handled by exporting/importing electricity. Without batteries it's very difficult to run a self-sufficient CO2-neutral republic. Particularly one that does not rely on nuclear power.

That power storage requires a lot of materials should be seen as an interesting challenge. Would also be a good excuse to add a lead industry to the game. 0.9t Pb + 0.05t chemicals + 0.05t plastic -> 1t batteries storing about 40 kWh. 35,000t to store one day's worth of output from a coal power plant (1400 MWh).

[tjoppen]

Just for fun I took the current price ratio between steel (~$600/t) and lead (~$2400/t), and an in-game spot price for steel of 443₽/t. The cost for importing lead for 35,000t of batteries in my example would be on the order of 55,000,000₽ :D

[XandrMoro]

Well, IRL your storage is your regional electrical network with maneuver electric stations compensating for unreliable "green" thingies to keep overall "amount" of electricity the same. But, well, you cant achieve that in the game because you can only either sell or buy electricity and you can not automatically buy when there is not enough and sell when you overproduce. What you can do is use sun and wind to reduce the coal consumption, but it hardly makes sense given that you cant run out of coal anyway.

The only thing I personally use wind generation for are gas stations on long routes to customs when you dont really want to build all the kilometers of wires just for that.

[tjoppen]

Originally posted by XandrMoro:

Well, IRL your storage is your regional electrical network with maneuver electric stations compensating for unreliable "green" thingies to keep overall "amount" of electricity the same.

This doesn't work if I want to pretend my nation is some kind of eco-Juche thing. Of course this doesn't work at the moment because heating requires coal. Maybe that's an excuse for me to mod some syngas/BECCS stuff in..

Originally posted by XandrMoro:

But, well, you cant achieve that in the game because you can only either sell or buy electricity and you can not automatically buy when there is not enough and sell when you overproduce.

Can't you buy and sell at different border stations?

[BanzaiCharge]

Originally posted by tjoppen:

Originally posted by XandrMoro:

Well, IRL your storage is your regional electrical network with maneuver electric stations compensating for unreliable "green" thingies to keep overall "amount" of electricity the same.

This doesn't work if I want to pretend my nation is some kind of eco-Juche thing. Of course this doesn't work at the moment because heating requires coal. Maybe that's an excuse for me to mod some syngas/BECCS stuff in..

Originally posted by XandrMoro:

But, well, you cant achieve that in the game because you can only either sell or buy electricity and you can not automatically buy when there is not enough and sell when you overproduce.

Can't you buy and sell at different border stations?

There is a mod which gives you geothermal plants which can produce heat or electricity with very little pollution and without the need of coal. It's very OP however.