Tips on effectively using renewable energy?

[Fart_Gas]

The fact that wind farms require zero staff and produce zero pollution is quite enticing. How can I use renewable energy (wind and solar) power effecctively?

[Ernst Cornell]

so far it seems that solar and wind are extremely complementary. when the sun shines the wind stills and when the wind blows the sun dims.

so my best guess is building both and connect them through a high voltage "backbone line" to the rest of the grid.

[Novu]

Hydroelectric power is also renewable and more reliable than wind and solar.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2223222318

[joeball123]

Wind turbines are in my experience useful as nearly-uninterruptible power sources for cableways, as power sources for low-demand things that aren't worth running a transmission line for (e.g. an isolated gas station or farm out in the countryside), and maybe as power supplies for residential areas (housing doesn't have particularly high power requirements and rarely seems to hit its rated demand anyways, even when the houses are full). They are not, however, worth connecting into the grid in any substantial way - even at rated capacity, they simply don't have the output to be worth the bother (the large wind turbine's only rated for 0.56 MW, so even if they could achieve rated output - which I can't say I've ever seen them do - you'd need ~25 of them to max out a transformer and ~32 of them to reach a foreign power connection's maximum export limit), and they average considerably less than that. Build them within direct-connection range of whatever low-demand stuff you want them to power, or don't build them at all.

The only really practical use I see for solar plants is for power exports - 8 workers and no fuel is a pretty low investment for what's probably around 7MW average exportable power production per plant with the day-night cycle on. You might be able to use them to cut domestic power costs if you use them to replace coal/oil/nuclear plants or power imports during the day, but it's not like solar plants are particularly cheap compared to coal or oil plants, it's not that expensive to import power or the coal and oil you need to operate a domestic power plant (for that matter, it's not all that expensive to produce the coal or especially the oil domestically), and you need something to provide reliable domestic power overnight. As nearly as I can tell, there is no power option in the game which can replace solar overnight without also rendering solar redundant during the day, nor is there any storage system in place which would allow you to cover nocturnal demands with daytime overproduction.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Ernst Cornell:

so far it seems that solar and wind are extremely complementary. when the sun shines the wind stills and when the wind blows the sun dims.

Sure about that?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2794043200

That foreign power connection is hooked up to 32 of the vanilla large wind turbines (theoretically 18.56 MW generation capacity), with nothing else drawing power from them and no power lines which should be overloaded (24 of the turbines are cascaded into a transformer and then tied into the high-voltage connection at the foreign power connection; the other eight are connected into two of the medium-voltage connections). Wind speed varied between about 7 and 14 m/s overnight; observed power figures at the foreign power connection varied from about 0.5 to 3.5 MW, mostly hovering around 2.2 MW.

The vanilla solar power plant has a maximum generation capacity of 9.8 MW. Vanilla large wind turbines have a maximum listed generation capacity of about 560 kW, though I've never seen them achieve it and for the single-night experiment I reported above it looks like they averaged about 70kW overnight. At 560 kW per large wind turbine, you'd need about 18 large wind turbines to cover for a single solar power plant; at 70 kW per large wind turbine, you'd need about 140 - and, remember, 70 kW is my estimate of the average power output; it is worth bearing in mind that that estimated average is more than four times higher than the observed minimum instantaneous output from the wind farm during the night.


Incidentally, in this particular game this 32-turbine wind farm is the sole power exporter to the Western bloc, and I also have a single coal power plant set up to export about 7 MW to the Eastern bloc. Both the wind farm and the coal power plant were built in 1960 and were in full operation by 1 January 1961. Annual power exports to the East and West since then have been:
1961: 157.1 GWh to the East, 55.1 GWh to the West
1962: 155.8 GWh to the East, 53.8 GWh to the West
1963: 157.4 GWh to the East, 56.7 GWh to the West
1964 (to April 11): 39.9 GWh to the East, 14.1 GWh to the West

Given that my coal power plant's power export is limited to 7 MW and yet it has consistently exported roughly three times the power as my 32-turbine wind farm, which is 'limited' to the maximum single-external-connection export of 18 MW, this suggests that my wind farm averages about 2.5 MW.

[Ernst Cornell]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย joeball123:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Ernst Cornell:

so far it seems that solar and wind are extremely complementary. when the sun shines the wind stills and when the wind blows the sun dims.

Sure about that?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2794043200

yeah i fiddled about a bit more and found that sometimes there's no wind nor sun at all. my mistake

[Incrediblejimmy]

Biggest discovery for me in that regard was that transformers work both ways^^

Imho the main use of renewables currently is:
- Powering isolated demand, ie. gas stations in the middle of nowhere - or starting on island maps
- Having redundancy in electricity production itself - so i.e. if Trolleys or Trams get your workers to the coal plant , having those systems connected to wind turbines makes sure running out of workers doesn't become a permanent thing
- in general I use it complementary - production is weather and time dependent, so not reliable, but connecting it to the grid means you can save fuel in other powerplants whenever there is sun or wind -> allthough that could really use better priority management options...