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As you say i assumed it was from a lack of electrical power and doubled the high voltage splitter stattions, the transformer stations and the amount of substation in those area's. But to no avail.
The only thing that is left to wonder about if these places - that were once when developing in early game were the CENTER of the power grid - might now in a large nation with several cities be on the outer edge of the nation wide power grid, and power locally produced might be flowing away to other cities, causing low power in area's that originally had enough power with their own local power plant.
I haven't used priority switching yet, if above could be the cause that might be the solution to it, preventing power "leaking" away to the nations grid and again serve the local environment as it was originally setup. For that to implement in my current play i need to radically break open and alter existing power infrastructure and might depopulate the entire nation while doing it.
I hope it is that and not some bug. The flickering is annoying enough to avoid street and footpath lighting, but it is hard to avoid the best traveling speed they offer.
Electriscity is like fluid in this game, power is sucked, if new power is not delivered in sufficient amount, voltage drops, if voltage drops, power consumption drops, if power consumption drops, voltage is recovered and here we go again, due to time delay, light is blinking.
Yes, but like i said i doubled the entire superstructure and the regions that are affected have their own local coal or gas power station ( plus a number of wind turbines ) so i am 100 % sure nothing is overburdened.
What you say could be right : power acts as a fluid so probably is flowing toward the nations entire grid instead of to the local destination.
In this way a coal power plant that used to supply power in abundance to a certain city now is incapable of sending enough power to that same city and the lights begin to flicker. The weirness of that is that i have multiple power plants so power should not be flowing away.
And the cause of that is that there is no tab, map or anything that gives an overview how power is distributed. I am aware of the map overview where you can see which line is overburdened but this does not show where power is flowing to overall.
The actual solution could be to use priority switches ( not in the game for no reason i assume ) to prevent a local power plant sending off too much power to a nationwide connected grid, and too little power to the local city it belongs to.
They are also helpful for incinerators generating power (connect incinerator as high priority output to avoid clogging by trash)
Of course in the sense that the player has to figure this out, with no explanation given.
I admit that is what makes the game so great to me, but to more casual players it might be discouraging to have no easy insight as to why systems you build are failing, and more importantly work fine for 40 years and then start failing. ( without repair of buildings and machines having to do with that )
That is what i was thinking by doubling ALL infrastructure around a problem flickering streetlight city, and adding an extra gas fueled power station connected directly to that grid.
It alleviated the problem, but did not solve it.
That is where the conclusion was rising it must be power flowing AWAY toward a HUUUUUGE national, connected to everything power grid ( that is what water or air would do with a lower pressure area ) and priority switches are likely needed to keep the power from flowing away from local power grids, that were designed to and get power from a local power plant and did so without problems when the expanding nation around it was much smaller or did not exist yet.
A good experiment would be to not connect all powergrids and only have local power networks serving their own city and local environment. And then see if there would ever be a flickering problem. If this is so, the priority switches are a solution too, but now with the ability to supply surplus power to elsewhere. If anything power plants usually are over dimensioned for my size cities....that is why it so strange they fail after 40 or so years and the flickering begins to occur. But the only thing that has changed in 40 years is the size of the nation wide powergrid connected to it.
It is most logical if this nationwide powegrid just slurps power away from everywhere and feeds it into area's that unnoticable are underpowered.
Therefore the game could need a much more obvious and easier to read mapview of general power distribution and where it flows to. And not only make visible overburdenend lines and the exact voltage or ampere buildings have. You can get above mentioned info from that too, but it is much harder to overview and find causes of failure.
Are you never amazed when you play a map for over a month and go into subterrain view to barely if at all recognize your own work and why you build the structures in older parts of the map that lay there the way you designed them to be ? And it can be a daunting puzzle indeed to figure out how to even adjust the systems you put in place there ? :-))
In a next play i will go for local not connected to nationwide power grids i think, and if everything will be as i think it will be carefully build priority switches and then see what happens. My current huuuuge nation will have a non-recoverable depopulation meltdown if i meddle and interrupt power supply to build priority switches now.
I thought wind turbines and solar plants added energy to the rest of the grid, but no. That's not how it works. They replace the network in their area of effect. So if they don't work at all, it works. But if they give something that's not enough, you have a breakdown. Even if you have other power supply which is sufficient from other sources.
Power plants do not add up to one another. In one way or another, only one power plant is connected to each consumer. Not a combination of two or more. As wind turbines give very little, they create voltage drops.
If I'm right, then for me it's a bug....
If there is not sufficient draw on the capacity of the two plants, then the HV priority switch will draw power from that plant which has the highest priority. So if the solar plant is set to medium/low and the coal plant is high, then the coal plant will provide all of the power and the solar none. If the solar is set to high and the coal to medium/low then the HV output is all coming from the solar plant, and the coal is providing only a small amount of MV to the factories close to it.
In that last configuration, with day/night enabled, then as soon as it starts getting dark and the output of the solar plant drops (it doesn't go from max to zero in one go, there is a short transition) then the coal plant increases smoothly to compensate until the coal is providing all of the power and the solar none. That also happens if the solar or coal stop working for any other reason (lack of workers, problem supplying coal). There is full redundancy and the supply to the factories, apartments etc. is never interrupted, the switch just takes power from whatever is available, given the priorities.
So, I conclude you are either not using a prioritised HV switch, or you are using the switch with the priorities set the same AND the republic is not drawing more than the maximum of the coal plant. If you use the prioritised HV switch with the solar set higher than the coal then your republic will use clean solar power during the daytime. At night the coal will take over seamlessly, without any interruption to the republic. Coal is only consumed at night and pollution is only created at night. If you don't have the day/night cycle enabled, then the coal would only ever be a backup for the solar.
To note, to get these results I had configured the grid so that the HV outputs of both the solar and coal plants go to the same HV priority switch, they do not connect to a transformer until after that. But the coal plant is close enough to some factories that it acts as a MW substation for them. If there are transformers between the solar plant and the HV priority switch and/or between the coal plant and the HV priority switch, then results are going to be different - I suspect that each plant will always provide sufficient power to their local MW system. However, in that case you will lose the redundancy, as the HV prioritised switch is unidirectional - the connections from the two plants have to be on the input side.
To complete these notes, there is a third input available to the HV prioritised switch. Connecting this to an external connection on the border which is set to import and setting its priority to low allows three-way redundancy. You can have the solar plant operating during the day, the coal at night, and if anything happens to both during the day or there is any issue at night that the coal cannot provide all of the supply, the switch will just draw on the external connection. Again entirely seamlessly without any power interruptions to the factories and apartments. The only downside is that you need to provide workers to the coal plant even during the day while it is doing nothing.
So, this is a further reason to design your power grid so that all of the transformers, and therefore all of the MW substations, are all running from the output from a HV prioritised switch. You can have a system which is uninterruptible, providing it is not drawing more than about 20-21 MW (the system will allow you to temporarily go over the 18 MW limit of the highest capacity HV lines).
You can also connect both power plants to a second external connection on the borders, and set that to export. Rather than the power plants then just outputting what the republic needs, they will output their maximum capacity and make some money. If one stops for any reason, such as the solar at night or in bad weather, then the amount being exported will drop, but the system still keeps going..
The downside of that is that the coal plant absolutely churns through coal and produces maximum pollution. The safest way is to connect only the solar plant to an external connection. This requires a second HV prioritised switch, where the single input is from the solar plant, and there are two medium priority outputs, one to border connection and one to the rest of the grid, ie. to the first HV prioritised switch. The coal plant then has no way to send any of its output to an external connection, it doesn't produce money for you, but it conserves coal and drastically reduces pollution. You could sell the coal you were going to burn to offset the loss of money. To note the vanilla solar plant can produce a tidy 10 MW at maximum capacity with just 8 workers, that's easily enough to power a small republic and still make a small amount of money. It's only about 1100 roubles per month in 1960, so hardly worth it in my opinion, yet it's free in terms of not providing any resource such as coal or oil in the plant.
Finally, if you want to go all green, you could shut down the coal plant (stop workers going there as a temporary measure to prove it works, rather than demolishing it) and power your republic during the daytime from the solar plant and use imported power at night. This is economically feasible and eliminates all pollution. Your republic could be too big to get rid of the coal plant for now, but you can be confident that building a second solar plant will not mean that only one of them ever gets used - if they are both connected to an HV prioritised switch with the same priority then both will be used. And the output from the two (about 10 MW max. each) will just about operate through a single 18 MW HV line.
My situation is simpler. At the time, I only had a solar power plant and a few wind turbines. I imported most of the energy. The solar plant was connected to a priority switch, one output set to low priority to sell energy, the other to high priority and connected to the grid.
Of course, most of the energy was imported. The solar power plant was supposed to produce a little, and bring me cash.
But, to provide workers and firefighters for this solar power plant, I placed a transformer and a substation nearby which I connected to a three-pole switch. Here is a diagram...
Solar power plant -> priority switch -> three-pole switch
/ -> rest of the network (energy import)
/ -> transformer -> substation
(the three-pole switch, transformer and substation are located in the operating area of the solar power plant)
Day or night, and even in times of change, everything goes well. The substation receives energy from either source. The problem usually occurs in winter, when the solar plant is producing but at a lower voltage than normal.
No problem on the network... but, strangely, the three-pole switch and the substation experience a reduction in voltage. I wonder if it's because they are in the area of effect of the solar plant.
In any case, this is not due to cables or insufficient production.
I think that's also how the other power plants work. With gas/coal/nuclear it won't usually be an issue because they deliver a pretty much constant output. But i used to have blinking street lights near an incinerator power plant when it wasn't receiving a constant supply of trash to burn.
There's a similar effect with water treatment plants: those are the exclusive source of drinking water for workers *in the treatment plant itself*. Which means you can't use water treatment plants to improve water quality enough as needed by some industries but less than needed for workers. A water treatment plant will not use better quality water from nearby infrastructure nor have it delivered by water truck (except maybe when the plant isn't producing any water at all..).
If you want to dive in deep and have time for it, look up "complete electricity guide" (or somehow like that) from Silent_Shadow here on steam in tutorials section. There you will find extreme amount of information including these and how to prevent/use them (including pictures and schematics).
Because there is a lot to be learned and "ways of power" are computed in a certain way that need some game-education to understand fully.
What? Priority Switches are in the game!
Check https://workers-resources.fandom.com/wiki/Electricity#Power_switch.
What? You're judging somebody's statement from 8 months ago!
check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time