Power switch(priority)

[nkm57]

How to make this puzzle work?(beta)

[Beast of War]

i am partly puzzled myself, but i think i came to understand how it works. It does 3 things different from the normal equal power splitters, i will first mention the 2 most important to me :

1) It can divide available KW going in, in unequal ( hi or low priority ) divided KW going out.
2) It is one direction, having an ingoing siide and an outgoing side. It won't export power from the outgoing connections.

I decided to use it on the large solar power plant providing most of its generated KW as export to the border and some of it for my own city, to reduce coal or oil usage of my power plants during the day.

I could have built a normal equal power splitter but the whole setup was to make some money by exporting not really needed solar KW that is useless in the night, while not exporting power from my cities power plants as i need that myself.

It doesn't really switch but divide the available KW coming in, in unequal amounts to be set by you going out. And in one direction : it has an input side and an output side.

This has the advantage you can have power plants on the outgoing connection that are not exporting KW ( a normal divider would ) but only importing it. ( to reduce the load on those power plants )

And the advantage you can have most KW ( high priority ) send to an output destination of your choice, and less KW ( low priority ) to a less important/demanding output destination.

[nkm57]

This is my line setup but it not working,the circuit cannot draw power from coal.

coal power ->_ x>_ x>
___________ switch _____--> oil pump
waste power-> _x>_x>
cannot bring the power from coal plant
dont mind the "_" lines,it for frame this diagram

[Beast of War]

Originally posted by nkm57:

This is my line setup but it not working

waste power coal power --- v
------ |--------------- | ------- _
High Low
\
to oil pump
| ----- v
Med---- _

cannot bring the power from coal plant

You aware there is an in going side to that structure and an outgoing side ?

If you connect 2 lines to one side of the building it wont give power.

[nkm57]

two power in and one power out,but the coal lines feel missing.And i set the waste power as high for main.

[Beast of War]

Originally posted by nkm57:

wait it need four side connected to be work?

No one line on each side of the building as a minimal. IN going, OUT going.

[nkm57]

Look like my network has bid delay i see

[MG83]

Example use :

Import side 1 connected to voltage switch1 then switch to border low priority selected.
import side 2 connected to power plant. high priority
import side 3 empty.
output 1 side connected to city high priority
output 2 side connected to industry area. medium priority
output 3 side connected to voltage switch 1 .

when you start your city select import power from bored . thus your city and industry area is powered and you start your city. As your city develop it starts to produce from power plant thus you begin to import les and less power till your city big enough and feeds non stop workers to power plant. Then you realise your power plant is not at max capacity but you are no longer importing electricy. then you select stop import power from border and select export power. Now when your power plant has excess power it sells to border without causing blackout to city. :>

[Onbird]

I really hoped that priority switches would allow me to use intermittent power sources as first priority, and switch to a backup source when the main source isn't producing.

In a newly built town, I connected a waste incinerator power plant to one input with high priority, and my general electric grid to another input with medium priority. There is only one connected output, which goes to a transformer to feed the local medium voltage distribution grid.

But whenever the incinerator plant goes idle (for lack of waste or workers), the main HV grid connection fails to kick in. It won't re-route any of its existing output, keeping on exporting the surplus despite newfound demand in the aforementioned switch. Really disappointing. Now I have built incinerators in vain. I guess I shouldn't rely on them for electricity, and only go for heating incinerators once my garbage production is at a sufficient level for that.

[Zentra]

Originally posted by Konrad von Richtmark:

I really hoped that priority switches would allow me to use intermittent power sources as first priority, and switch to a backup source when the main source isn't producing.

In a newly built town, I connected a waste incinerator power plant to one input with high priority, and my general electric grid to another input with medium priority. There is only one connected output, which goes to a transformer to feed the local medium voltage distribution grid.

But whenever the incinerator plant goes idle (for lack of waste or workers), the main HV grid connection fails to kick in. It won't re-route any of its existing output, keeping on exporting the surplus despite newfound demand in the aforementioned switch. Really disappointing. Now I have built incinerators in vain. I guess I shouldn't rely on them for electricity, and only go for heating incinerators once my garbage production is at a sufficient level for that.

Perhaps file a bug report to make the devs aware of it?

[Ichangedmynamelol]

Originally posted by Konrad von Richtmark:

I really hoped that priority switches would allow me to use intermittent power sources as first priority, and switch to a backup source when the main source isn't producing.

In a newly built town, I connected a waste incinerator power plant to one input with high priority, and my general electric grid to another input with medium priority. There is only one connected output, which goes to a transformer to feed the local medium voltage distribution grid.

But whenever the incinerator plant goes idle (for lack of waste or workers), the main HV grid connection fails to kick in. It won't re-route any of its existing output, keeping on exporting the surplus despite newfound demand in the aforementioned switch. Really disappointing. Now I have built incinerators in vain. I guess I shouldn't rely on them for electricity, and only go for heating incinerators once my garbage production is at a sufficient level for that.

I experienced same bug here. My workaround solution is to build a large waste transfer and turn it on once waste transfer about to full.

[Dummkopf]

Gotta love finding a nearly game breaking bug like this. I plugged an incinerator (power) in with a coal power plant with normal connections and it caused weird voltage issues that went away when one of the two was disconnected. So I plug them both into a switch and it just breaks. The incinerator stops from having no waste, and the coal power never comes in unless you turn off the incinerator.

The real game breaking part is that my republic creates enough waste that trying to fix this issue is almost impossible in realistic mode. Just rewiring the incinerator into the switch caused a massive waste backup that ended up affecting the coal processing industry and thus the coal power plant.

Guess I'll just babysit the incinerator until I can think of a work around. I'm thinking I'll rewire the incinerator into it's own export power line and just ignore it.

[Sirius Czech]

Electricity in this game behaves like water. It takes a bit of time to fill from one source once the main (unstable) goes out.

I reviewed my friends save and he had a problem of not enough power and local blackouts in his massive oil field. He was taking some wires in from transformer and also had few massive widn turbines inside.

His first problem was not enough line capacity going in (full consuming with those 20+ wells was over 2,4KW while his wires brought in only 1,5MW as that was the ones he built). Easy fix there.

Second problem was instability of those windmills. Once they went out, a short blackout appeared in some sections before customs import could fully cover that with pumping enough power back in; once there was enough wind again (over 5km/h windspeed), those windmills started to go back online again and were making power. Selecting the same "priority" for all inputs helped with network stability and those small shortages were short enough that no pop-up messages appeared, which is nice.

In the end I tried to rewire/rebuild them as "external wind park" and connect in via another tranformer and priority switches and set priorities for them. Bad thing is that you cannot send power via transformer BACK to the network, so you have to avoid using it as a connecting piece.

If you want to see it as a live experiment, here it is. Just start at this timestamp, before that it is mostly analysis of what am I looking at that map. Video is in CZ but general overlay with MW present is helpful enough to understand the situation.
https://youtu.be/4LImujr6r3Y?si=i4-r9bvzjEl0zxDY&t=1681

[Karma]

Huh. For what it's worth, I have a prioritization Switch wired to take electricity first from an Incinerator, then from a Coal plant, and lastly from foreign imports. I've run the game for ~30 years now, and never had a single problem or flicker with electricity, even as the Incinerator (and the Coal plant, at first) were quite intermittent in their power production.

[Silent_Shadow]

Waste power plants are bugged right now and will be fixed in the next update.

Power sources will share loading depending on to the number of "nodes" between them and the load, and it is possible to prioritize power sources over other power sources, including wind and solar power.