[Suggestion] Combined heat and power

[A Mole of Iron]

So, I searched it, and it has come up already before (at least one time), but I would love an answer from the dev team: are there any plans to introduce some form of combined heat and power (AKA co-generation) mechanic, where the waste heat from power plants is used for district heating? My feelings are genuinely hurt (just a bit) by the fact that a Soviet-planned-economy-themed game does not have combined heat and power, it just clashes with my lived experience too much :c

On a related note: I downloaded some mods (a power plant and heating plant set by Wild Bunny) that I seem to remember are using the cooling pipes mechanic (used by the vanilla game for nuclear reactors) for a similar effect, and I wonder if that could simply be made an official mechanic in a vanilla game for some particular model of fossil fuel power plant.

[Havran00]

+1

[forzion]

I also suggested to use the cooling pipes to power a heating module from power plants. But it was a long time ago and it did not come into focus since then.

But first of all it would require a coal power plant with nuclear power plant cooling mechanic.

[A Mole of Iron]

Originally posted by forzion:

But first of all it would require a coal power plant with nuclear power plant cooling mechanic.

That's something that has come up in a thread I found on the subject, as did game balance... but hey, maybe this should be a more expensive, more complex "Heat and Electricity Central" ("теплоэлектроцентраль"), to avoid ditching the original coal plant and also to balance the benefit of it producing heat as well as power?

[dumba]

Would be great, and also true to life. Many power plants provide heat as well.

[vajeeking]

We can also discuss if waste water in purified form is like 85% quality. Should it have reuse in like fabric factory? to make inner circle to recycle waste water and add some inputs and outputs in buildings. Recycling waste water, because you invest money to purify it anyway and dump it to the river. Anyway in USSR times or still is little unknown issue recycle stuff, they just like to dump s*it in water and nature.

[forzion]

Originally posted by vajeeking:

We can also discuss if waste water in purified form is like 85% quality. Should it have reuse in like fabric factory? to make inner circle to recycle waste water and add some inputs and outputs in buildings. Recycling waste water, because you invest money to purify it anyway and dump it to the river. Anyway in USSR times or still is little unknown issue recycle stuff, they just like to dump s*it in water and nature.

There is a problem because water and waste water are 2 different resources like coal ore and coal are different. That is the reason you cannot use that. But if there is a mod that can make nuclear waste from waste water there may be a way to create a modded facility to tranform waste water into water.

But you would never drink a waste water purified into drinking water I guess. Because if you can make it pure enough to use in industry, then you xan make it pure enough to use for drinking and food production

[Karma]

I *think* that I'd seen a dev comment that the game engine doesn't really handle buildings with multiple outputs all that well. That is, if a building is flagged to have "Input [X] and outputs [Y + Z]," then the instant that the building cannot store or export *either* of its outputs it stops working entirely. So like an oil refinery: if it cannot store either fuel or bitumen, it stops producing either.

The problem is that if power stations or heat stations are currently written in the engine as "building that converts [fuel] into [power] or [heat], then combining the two could result in a power plant that stops working at all in summer because it can't heat anything. So they'd probably have to change the system of how cooling towers work, to allow some sort of "coolant pipe splitter with prioritization" so you can direct hot coolant to a heat-exchanger when possible or to a cooling tower when the exchanger is full.

[Silent_Shadow]

Some types of resources are exclusive. Aggregates seemly cannot be handled along with any other good by vehicles, storage, and stations; it may be similar with water and "sewage."

Originally posted by vajeeking:

We can also discuss if waste water in purified form is like 85% quality.

I think there are a few issues with this:

• Water is conserved, so if you fill a system that recycles its water, it may "lock up" when a building can no longer push sewage or pull clean water.
  
• Toilet to tap is barely practiced today; the technology may not have been prevalent enough in the 1960's for our somewhat backward republics.
  
• Recycling water again and again will concentrate contaminates that the normal system may not cover (their concentration would be too low for a single pass through the system).
  
• It would be too good. Right now you need to use chemicals to purify water and then use chemicals again for purifying sewage. If you had the option to spend chemicals only once per water cycle, why wouldn't you?
  
• Your citizens may not like the idea of their sewage water being used in their clothing (even if purified). Most people today don't either and we have a better opinions of our water treatment systems.

There definitely are some uses for reclaimed water that could be implemented, but populations and industrial pollution don't mix well, so you would need a lot of piping over a km to supply an industry with water.

[A Mole of Iron]

Originally posted by Karma:

I *think* that I'd seen a dev comment that the game engine doesn't really handle buildings with multiple outputs all that well. That is, if a building is flagged to have "Input [X] and outputs [Y + Z]," then the instant that the building cannot store or export *either* of its outputs it stops working entirely. So like an oil refinery: if it cannot store either fuel or bitumen, it stops producing either.

The problem is that if power stations or heat stations are currently written in the engine as "building that converts [fuel] into [power] or [heat], then combining the two could result in a power plant that stops working at all in summer because it can't heat anything. So they'd probably have to change the system of how cooling towers work, to allow some sort of "coolant pipe splitter with prioritization" so you can direct hot coolant to a heat-exchanger when possible or to a cooling tower when the exchanger is full.

Okay, now that is a very serious reason why combined heat and power may be too difficult to implement. I have seen it with my own two eyes that "Heat and Electric Central" stations still have to use cooling towers, and in fact, Wikipedia points out that all of the heat can't be drawn into the heating system; there's too much of it. But it'd be a crying shame if that stopped the in-game implementation, because this kind of more efficient district heating is an inextricable part of the somewhat-high living standards and "good engineering is our pride and joy" mentality of the Stagnation Era (i.e. 1960s and 1970s).

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Karma:

I *think* that I'd seen a dev comment that the game engine doesn't really handle buildings with multiple outputs all that well. That is, if a building is flagged to have "Input [X] and outputs [Y + Z]," then the instant that the building cannot store or export *either* of its outputs it stops working entirely. So like an oil refinery: if it cannot store either fuel or bitumen, it stops producing either.

The problem is that if power stations or heat stations are currently written in the engine as "building that converts [fuel] into [power] or [heat], then combining the two could result in a power plant that stops working at all in summer because it can't heat anything. So they'd probably have to change the system of how cooling towers work, to allow some sort of "coolant pipe splitter with prioritization" so you can direct hot coolant to a heat-exchanger when possible or to a cooling tower when the exchanger is full.

It seems to me that there are two "easy" workarounds for this:
1. Create a power plant (the Generator Building) that uses heating water as its "fuel." A Heating Plant connected to both a Generator Building and a district heating system is a co-generation plant.

2. Create a new resource (steam) and three new buildings (Boiler Station, Generator Building, High-Temperature Heat Exchanger). Generator Buildings accept steam and produce electricity, High-Temperature Heat Exchangers accept steam and produce heating water, and Boiler Stations produce steam using some fuel (coal, oil, and nuclear fuel could all work). A Boiler Station connected to both a Generator Building and a High-Temperature Heat Exchanger is a co-generation plant.

Neither of these is entirely realistic, but both of them avoid the two-outputs issue and would probably be good enough for the game's purposes, as long as the game allows you to use heating water or whatever resource you'd use for method 2 thusly.

[VV!1d_8µnn¥]

thats probably not my mod you mentioned but i tried to make a cogeneration power plant but it did not work, because power and heat is produced by demand and not by resource that is available, so they cancel each other out and the cogeneration plant i made produced none of both, that was a real downer, but it would be possible to make a building that would "convert" electric power to heating power i planned for such a building but dismissed it because its kind of cheaty and also it would not increase efficiency of the powerplant overall.